


ours is a distant shore

by preciouslittletime



Series: outside of time [2]
Category: SEVENTEEN (Band)
Genre: Fifty Years of a Love Story In Four Parts, Immortals, Inspired by The Old Guard, M/M, Mild Sexual Content, Soulmates, Temporary Character Death, The Beginnings of Lee Seokmin's Immortality, Yoon jeonghan centric - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-05
Updated: 2020-09-27
Packaged: 2021-03-06 03:09:20
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 4
Words: 35,767
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25736320
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/preciouslittletime/pseuds/preciouslittletime
Summary: Lee Seokmin dies at twenty-two years old, alone, several kilometres off the port of Busan.And then he begins the process again.
Relationships: Lee Seokmin | DK/Yoon Jeonghan
Series: outside of time [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1865458
Comments: 46
Kudos: 132





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This is the "prequel" Seokmin and Jeonghan-centric continuation of [take the heart, leave the bone](https://archiveofourown.org/works/25718818/chapters/62449012). [Kim](https://archiveofourown.org/users/dygonilly/pseuds/dygonilly) and I have spent the last few weeks building a little world I'm so proud of. Our ideas going back and forth about the main story had me stuck on the journey of Jeonghan and Seokmin. So that's what this will be featuring the rest of the immortal boys. 
> 
> A special thank you to [Ria](https://archiveofourown.org/users/skateboardachoo/pseuds/skateboardachoo) for giving this part a beta read and reminding me to trust myself. 
> 
> I have a playlist [here](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/2cQE4Da0MG0EiqAUcIHXLL?si=19S9Ov_PQP-NDSirnKT3JA).

Humans don’t drown all at once. There’s a process, orderly and sensible like most functions of the human body. Jeonghan appreciates the organized way biology settles itself into predictable tedium.

First; Lee Seokmin feels the urge to breathe due to hypercapnia. 

Second; a small amount of water forces his trachea to spasm, and he aspirates on salt water, hot and acrid. 

Third; the lack of oxygen to his brain begins cerebral anoxia and he convulses several times before coming to rest peacefully on the ocean floor. 

Finally; his brain function stops entirely, and he enters cardiac arrest. 

Lee Seokmin dies at twenty-two years old, alone, several kilometres off the port of Busan.

And then he begins the process again.

____________________________________________________________________________

_Jeonju_

_1442_

______________________________________________________________________________

Junhui works through the tangles in the ends of Jeonghan’s cascading hair, holding it in a fist as he pulls it through an opalescent abalone comb. The oils he uses smell of jasmine, aromatic and sharp, and he is careful not to tug when he separates the knotted strands.

“I am not a doll,” Jeonghan giggles, leaning into the ministrations.

“Yet you look as though you like to be treated like one,” Junhui mutters with a smile playing at his lips that Jeonghan cannot see.

Minghao dresses him in a patterned silk which shines in the candlelight of their room in the inn. His brow is set and focused as he ties the panels into place and Jeonghan prickles with the eyes on him that reveal so little. Minghao and Junhui are nearly the same age, and yet Jeonghan doesn’t feel like running when Junhui appraises him.

“How do I look?” Jeonghan smirks. It’s an attempt to demonstrate his bravery, that he is not so afraid of the circumstances.

Junhui drapes the cascade of Jeonghan’s hair over his shoulder and Jeonghan steels his face the way the classes of rich men had looked down on him for twenty-five years. Before, when they made him feel an infinitesimal insect on the side of muddy roads, when they tore their own table scraps from his hands and strolled past him sleeping in the road under thin blankets of his own skin. As if by underfeeding him they’d starve him out like a blight in a field of healthy crops they’d let wither.

These men would know the finality of death the way Jeonghan would never come to understand. The blight that always returns.

Minghao’s smile is tight lipped, but kind as he strokes an errant hair from Jeonghan’s forehead. He is earnest, “Fine clothes were made with you in mind, Jeonghan.”

______________________________________________________________________________

_San Francisco_

_1894-1896_

______________________________________________________________________________

San Francisco is overcast and cold like Northern Europe - he _detests_ Northern Europe. Jeonghan looks up at the clouds, fat with a rain that will never come, and spins a pistol on his left middle finger until the skin goes raw. Streetcars amble down through the avenue like ants in their hill, people busy down the sidewalks carrying crates to warehouses from the pier. They don’t look in his direction.

There are two men lying in the dirt floor alleyway. Both have matching knife wounds in their chests that bloom red on their shirts like rosettes.

He kneels downwards to inspect the injury of the first man, the aggressor, with his ruddy face going pale as his body empties itself of blood. He’d had a woman here not but ten minutes earlier, held against the dingy brick wall before the second man intervened. Jeonghan’s knife had hit the first man straight in his heart - left ventricle, he guesses. He shoves his fingers into the wound and smirks privately. _Correct_.

The other man is on his stomach, face in the dirt and blood seeping out from around his torso. Jeonghan crouches beside his corpse and turns him so he falls onto his back, lifeless, sprawled. 

He was handsome. _Is_ handsome. Jeonghan inches the hole in his shirt to the side, to where the wound is mending itself. His fingers are painted with blood when he traces the angular line of the man’s nose, over his parted lips filling with color again.

There are pink pathways over his skin from Jeonghan’s inspection that remain, a purple splotch on his cheek that disappears. His pocket watch - a parting gift from Mingyu before he went West - shows fifteen minutes have passed since the boy was stabbed, hand over head, directly into the left upper quadrant of his chest. They’re always so slow in the beginning.

His gasp would have startled Jeonghan if he wasn’t expecting it. With his eyes open now, wildly darting from side to side, he can see how handsome he truly is. Even colored with fear, they’re soft eyes. Angled and sparkling onyx black.

“Relax,” Jeonghan says in English. The man regards him with further panic, shoving at his chest, a mess of garbled Korean. Which is convenient. He repeats himself again in Korean this time. “Calm down. I’m trying to help you, you idiot.”

As if the man has just realized Jeonghan’s presence, he snaps his eyes to him in confusion. The terror increases instantaneously, and he starts to scramble backwards in the dirt until he hits the bricks of the building behind him. Jeonghan sighs exasperatedly, plucks the five-inch silver blade from his jacket pocket, flings his eyebrows up pointedly as he slices pointedly across his neck. 

He’s careful enough not to cut too deep and the boy lunges forward to stop him, abject horror coloring his narrow face. Jeonghan catches his wrist before he reaches his throat and grimaces as the pain shoots down into his toes when the blood begins to pour out of him. It’s a nasty business, losing blood. The human body isn’t clever enough to stop producing so much of it once it detects an interruption in the system. Jeonghan can feel the pulsating of his heart in the cut as it seeps onto his stiff collar.

The man is frozen in shock as the wound mends itself. He looks from Jeonghan’s throat to his eyes and back down again. Without preamble, he reaches forward to touch where the cut has disappeared, only stopping once he seemingly remembers the body is connected to a person. 

“Listen, I’m Jeonghan an-” 

“Lee Seokmin.” 

Jeonghan tips his head to the side in curiosity and Seokmin’s mouth catches on a smile. 

“You’re like me,” Seokmin exhales. Like a breath he’s been holding. Jeonghan breathes in.

\---

The first two weeks are a series of long silences.

Jeonghan has a room in a hotel where he’s prohibited from entering the front door. Procuring it requires finesse to lift a key from the front desk without anyone looking, and further tact to maintain anonymity. It prevents them from spending much time outside the small room, but it’s worlds away from Seokmin’s boarding house bedroom with mildew in the walls and rats chewing holes through the mattress.

Seokmin behaves like a mistreated child - fearful, with an undercurrent of dependency. He skirts around Jeonghan with his head bowed, eats food as if Jeonghan might change his mind about feeding him. He outfits Seokmin with a new wardrobe; American trousers, boots without holes in the soles, throws away the tattered _hanbok_ at the bottom of Seokmin’s rucksack. The un-tailored jacket swallows him alive, the shirt hangs on his starving frame. Seokmin thanks him in profuse whispers and speaks with such formality Jeonghan stops trying to correct him and _hyung_ becomes a compromise.

The silences are punctuated by questions.

_Hyung, are there others like us?_

_Yes, four others._

_Hyung, will I ever meet them?_

_Soon, we’re tied together in a way. They’ll turn up._

_Hyung, how old are you?_

_Almost five hundred._

_Hyung, will I live that long?_

_Not if you don’t just go back to sleep._

There are pristine moments when Seokmin speaks candidly and excitedly. Moments when he forgets that he’s supposed to be afraid of the other man in the room and sings to himself as he bathes. Those moments are undercut by Seokmin staring despondently out one of the windows. Moments where Seokmin wakes up from a nightmare with balled fists and gritted teeth.

There’s several days of rain and Jeonghan drinks tea at the table while Seokmin stirs in their shared bed. He pads into the sitting room with mussed hair, deep set eyes. Another string of nightmares, neither of them get much rest.

“I’m going out,” Jeonghan says simply. “You’ll stay here.”

Seokmin is still half asleep, rubbing at his eyes, information hitting him in waves. “Where are you going?”

“We need money.”

“Oh,” Seokmin whispers. Jeonghan slides him a bowl of warm cereal. Seokmin blanches but accepts the food with a curt bow. “I didn’t know you were employed.”

Jeonghan sighs. The newspaper is a series of articles discussing the need for immigration regulation in the state. Of course, out of all the cities in the world, the first person like them in centuries had to turn up in a city where he was decidedly unwanted. Seokmin thankfully can’t speak English, let alone read it. “I’m not employed. I’m going to rob a bank,” he says, setting down the newspaper and meeting Seokmin’s gaze.

“Oh.” 

The cogs in Seokmin’s head visibly sputter to life, turning over for minutes on themselves while Seokmin stares down into his cereal. His eyebrows knot up with resolve. “Hyung, can I help?”

“Very considerate of you, but I’m not sure that’s the best idea,” Jeonghan regards him with an arch of his eyebrow. He’d already seen Seokmin’s idea of defending himself. It was inelegant. “You’ll just get yourself killed again.”

Seokmin tilts up his chin at him, feigned boldness, all the pride of an inexperienced young man. “Not if you show me how not to die.”

\---

Seokmin’s hands shake as he aims a pistol fisted into both his sweaty palms. 

There’s a field of artichokes that spans for acres outside Salinas. The hills there are a deep green, smooth and rolling like a calm, verdant sea. A smattering of early morning rain has the two of their linen shirts plastered to their chests. The way Jeonghan’s hands slide across Seokmin’s torso to adjust his posture disadheres the fabric.

“One hand,” Jeonghan instructs directly into Seokmin’s ear. He adjusts one of the boy’s suspender straps that threatens to slide off his shoulder. “Two hands for something stronger. One hand for this.”

Seokmin follows the instruction wordlessly. His patchy eyebrows knit with concentration; tip of his pink tongue caught between his lips.

“And take your tongue out from between your teeth unless you want to spend two hours growing a new one.” Jeonghan smiles, but his tone is firm. Seokmin turns his head to regard Jeonghan over his shoulder, face softening once he sees the whites of his teeth.

“I’m sorry, _hyung_ ,” Seokmin whispers, slipping back into Korean habitually. 

“No. In English. Practice.”

It’s been a month and Seokmin garbles his words, American accent too heavy for his tongue. Jeonghan resigns himself to becoming a de facto educator due to Seokmin’s loose grasp on the concept of reading and inability to say anything in English other than _hello, please,_ and _how much?_

“Aim carefully,” Jeonghan breathes against his ear. He holds the butt of the pistol in his palm, chest pressed against Seokmin’s shoulder. Touch is natural, energizing for Jeonghan, but he detects the way Seokmin shrinks away from his overfamiliarity. 

“Aim is about breathing. Finding your center. Think of this gun as an extension of yourself. Every weapon should be that way.”

“It’s…” Seokmin pauses, searching for the word in English. “Afraid.”

“Seokmin-ah everyone should be afraid of _you_.”

He hits the target perfectly - a glass milk bottle that shatters into infinite pieces, sound echoing through the empty, sodden field. Seokmin looks down at his Smith & Wesson with glimmering, wild eyes. There’s something caged in him, an anger beyond the placidity of an affable smile and well-mannered speech. Seokmin fires three more times in quick succession, two hits and one miss.

The laughter bubbles out of him like an over-filled pot coming to boil. He turns to Jeonghan and Jeonghan swells with something that feels dangerously like pride. The wooden handle of his pistol fits in his palm so perfectly. His chest heaving with adrenaline-saturated breaths tugs at the once starched shirt across his narrow, starving frame.

Sunshine peeks through the clouds far off on a rolling hill, reflective off the wet grass the same as Seokmin’s smile. Jeonghan takes the pistol from his hand, shoves six more bullets into the cylinder.

“ _Hyung_ ,” Seokmin says, disobediently speaking Korean again. “I don’t want to kill anyone.”

Jeonghan puts the gun into his palm. “If we don’t mess it up, we won’t have to.”

Seokmin fails to see the humor. “But what if I have to?”

“Then you have to.” Jeonghan’s struggles with gentleness, but this is fear that he remembers. Distant now. Like the lights on a coast he used to call home, now only regarding them from the safety of the sea.

“It’s you or them, Seokmin-ah,” Jeonghan says with a smile he tames into kindness. “Survival isn’t just for humans.”

\---

Jeonghan makes it out of Folsom with $5,000 and Seokmin makes it out of Folsom with a bullet in his spine.

There’s a hotel in Sacramento that gives them a room with no questions asked because it’s a brothel before it is lodgings. Seokmin steeps himself in a steel tub in the middle of the room, knuckles white around the rim as he regains sensation in his legs.

He still shys away when he’s nude. Jeonghan hasn’t considered something like propriety since the late 15th century and dries his naked body with the late summer air pooling through the open window. California in the summertime is stifling, a bit like Spain or Greece - though, unfortunately not as civilized as either of those places. Jeonghan has promised to take Seokmin somewhere far more exciting once Soonyoung brings him his falsified records.

There’s the screech of a woman making a performance of enjoying whatever sexual encounter she’s been paid to provide and Seokmin recoils at the sound. Jeonghan can only see Seokmin's back from the chair he lounges on by the window. He watches where the wound is still working to shove out the bullet into the blood-tinged water.

“Stop feeling sorry for yourself, Seokmin,” Jeonghan commands. Seokmin has broadened in the last few months, strength begotten of tussles in dusty bank buildings where he learns to fight without grace.

Minghao had made a point to instruct Jeonghan when they first found him, teaching him how to wield a knife and disarm a man twice his weight. Jeonghan believes throwing somebody into the water will force their instincts to take over, that they’ll swim. He never learned half as much from Minghao as he did from not wanting to die.

“I’m not feeling sorry for myself,” Seokmin grunts. His back spasms and there’s the plop sound of a mangled bullet falling into his bathwater. He shudders, but then his shoulders begin to shake rhythmically and he’s tugging his legs up to his chest with newly built arms.

Jeonghan clicks his tongue, settles himself on the floor beside the tub so he can face Seokmin and the tracks of tears on his cheeks. There’s a flush creeping across them, too, as Seokmin looks down and regards Jeonghan’s soft cock resting on his thigh.

“What are you so upset about, hm?” Jeonghan tries. “I’ve told you before, it’s boring to be pitiful.”

There’s a hunk of rose scented soap left over from Jeonghan’s bath on the floor. He picks it up, lathers it between two palms, runs the suds through Seokmin’s dirt caked hair. At first, Seokmin seems comforted by it, and pushes his scalp into Jeonghan’s fingertips like a loyal dog. It’s that way for a moment, just the soft sound of Seokmin’s open mouthed breathing and his closed eyes. Jeonghan peers down his naked body, over tan skin made darker by the California sun, strong thighs made islands in the blood-stained water, the rise of his belly as he lapses pliant under Jeonghan’s touch.

But suddenly his face contorts and he’s hiccupping out a soft cry, pushing at Jeonghan’s wrists until he’s released. Jeonghan shivers with a strange feeling. Somewhere between frustration and sadness, like a child whose companions won’t play along with his game.

“Is it always so frightening to die?” Seokmin whispers. His eyes are pitch dark in the dim lamp-light radiating from the street below, from the first touches of dusk slipping into twilight. 

“Are _you_ afraid when you die?” Jeonghan deflects. It’s been 47 years since the last time he was revived. He does his best not to dwell on the sensation, but the memory of it spurs him not to repeat it.

Seokmin nods, drawing his knees up to his chest and resting his chin upon them. He looks straight ahead at the door to their room and the sliver of light beneath it. Jeonghan reflects for a moment, trying to consider the best way to respond, but Seokmin speaks first.

“I was married before.”

Jeonghan doesn’t remember what grief tastes like. He tries very hard to recall.

“She was sick for a very long time. She died very slowly. She must have been so afraid.”

Once, Minghao commented that Jeonghan lacked empathy. Jeonghan had laughed at what he was certain was an attempt at insulting him. Minghao had pressed his lips into his customary, displeased line and left him bleeding and alone in the middle of the road somewhere in São Paulo.

He’d found the feeling to be unnecessary, didn’t bother himself with experiencing it. But he can’t place the weighted sensation in his chest. He can’t place the way his stomach twists vice-like and terrible at the unfettered sorrow in Seokmin’s face. It makes him feel helpless, small, unimportant. Three qualities he spent years of his life attempting to rid himself of entirely.

He struggles for words in the silence and settles on: “Did you love her?”

Seokmin rubs the back of his hand across his nose. “It was arranged for us. But I loved her. Yes.”

Jeonghan crosses his arms on the tub, let’s his chin dig into the bones of his forearms. Seokmin untangles himself and leans back against the basin with a shaking sigh. He pushes the heels of his palms into his eyes and shakes his head. 

“Does it get any easier?” Seokmin says to the ceiling.

“What do you mean?”

“Losing people. I’m assuming you’ve lost so many.”

There’s a flicker of pity on Seokmin’s face. Jeonghan volleys it with a shrug. “I don’t make a habit of getting attached to people.”

He draws designs in the soapy water where it’s pink and murky. The light is dying in the room now, edging them into darkness. Jeonghan moves to light the kerosene lamp and hears the sloshing of water behind him. Seokmin’s wet footfalls on the floorboards reveal his location in the room, the way he slides into fresh clothes.

“You must have been lonely, _hyung_ ,” Seokmin says softly. Jeonghan lies half-dressed beside him in their narrow, shared bed. The springs squeal as Seokmin puts a reputable distance between their two bodies. 

“I had the others,” he lies. The summer air is stifling and Jeonghan wishes he was better at verbalizing how he felt watching Minghao and Junhui’s souls dance perfectly around each other for centuries. How much he hated them.

Seokmin initiates physical contact for the first time in months; with sweaty, pruned fingers folding over his own.

\---

Seokmin wastes his money on frivolous things, as if carrying it is like a splinter he’s itching to dig out before it’s ready. Jeonghan reminds him that the faster he spends it, the more they will need to steal. Though, Jeonghan doesn’t complain when he puts bank notes instead of coins in the hands of begging children by the pier.

They’re halfway through piling money into a bag in San Jose when the teller makes a break for the door of the vault. Seokmin misses the shot, the door closes, and latches shut. Seokmin gives him an expression of utter dread as Jeonghan unloads two rounds into the floor in frustration.

“Fuck!”

“What do we do?” Seokmin asks. He’s frozen with a stack of bank notes in his hand, jitters making the paper flutter. Jeonghan runs a hand through his hair and yanks at it like he’s trying to pull out the thoughts.

“Get up against the wall, get ready for a fight.”

“It’s not like they can kill us, _hyung_.”

“You haven’t been to jail before, clearly.”

Seokmin clicks open his revolver, checks that his rounds are in order, clicks it shut with the flick of his wrist. He’s shaped in Jeonghan’s image, razor's edge focused with a gun in his hand, flooded with the first waves of adrenaline. There are differences still.

Glaring differences in the way Seokmin fights with strong legs grounded into the floor when he swings hard at the first deputy to enter the room. His fist lands with the crack on the man’s cheek and sends him reeling towards Jeonghan. There’s two more that follow and Jeonghan makes the quick decision to kick flat against the first deputy’s back so he’s sent back to Seokmin in favor of taking on the other two single-handedly. 

Jeonghan aims fast and easy, hitting one of his two targets directly between the eyes. He crumples, revealing his companion’s fury behind him as he falls to the floor. Jeonghan casts the rifle aside for the knife in his belt and moves into position. Out of the corner of his eye he sees Seokmin narrowly miss the butt of his assailant's gun, the flash of his smile as he kicks the deputy’s feet out from underneath him.

The deputy attacking Jeonghan is slow. He’s an older man, perhaps late fifties. Jeonghan wonders if there was a time this man could have bested him in a fight, but he’s doubtful. He gives up every calculated move, hesitates too much when he squeezes the trigger so Jeonghan can slide step his shot. He takes a small pity, let’s the man hit him one time, ball-fisted and too wide on the side of his cheek, before he takes that same arm and breaks his radius on the jut of his knee.

Seokmin hits the man in the temple before Jeonghan can make another move. When he looks up, Seokmin is still aiming the barrel of his gun in Jeonghan’s direction. His chest is heaving, and he’s wide eyed and sweating with the exertion of a fight and the smothering weight of taking two human lives. 

“Seokmin-ah,” he cautions. “Gun down, please.”

Their eyes catch and Seokmin licks his lips. Before either of them can speak four men barge into the tension of the space. The first man carries a shotgun, pointed at Jeonghan and raised in aim. Jeonghan watches Seokmin lunge for him. Then, Jeonghan watches his own chest implode.

_Dying is one of the most unpleasant experiences. There are so many great pieces of literature that describe it so peacefully - fantastical lies meant to placate the madness of something ending. It’s decidedly not peaceful. A sustained scream until your throat catches flame and your lungs explode. No sound, endless darkness. Like tired limbs struggling to swim, he shrieks for somebody to hear._

The first thing he sees is Seokmin’s eyes, disconsolate and red with tears. 

Distantly he feels his body in Seokmin’s lap, feels the way Seokmin shakes. There’s blood on Jeonghan’s cheek and he can smell it, Seokmin’s palm smearing it up across his eyelid. He blinks around the bone deep pain of growing his rib cage.

“Jeonghan,” Seokmin breathes out, body still wracked with sobs. His mouth hovers over Jeonghan’s forehead, breath tickling at his hairline, Jeonghan’s face cradled into Seokmin’s chest. 

“I’m alright.” Jeonghan winces as his ribs fall back into their order and Seokmin scrambles to pull him closer. He’s never felt the other boy’s body pressed up against his like this, never been enveloped by him, protected by him.

The scene around them is gore. Enough that even Jeonghan flinches at the sight. Blood and bone, Seokmin’s knuckles raw and healing by the second. Men lifeless and the sulfurous flavor of gunpowder in the air.

“Seokmin what did you do?”

Seokmin chokes out a sob and buries his forehead into Jeonghan’s temple. Skin grows slowly with wounds this deep. It stings and Jeonghan’s clutches too hard at the hair of Seokmin’s nape when the feeling overtakes him. Seokmin shudders, slides his lips across skin and presses them down to Jeonghan’s forehead.

“I’m alright,” he swears again, but Seokmin doesn’t move. Blood dries solid in the time he holds Jeonghan in his vice grip arms. Tacky, uncomfortable on his chest with fresh skin. Something takes deep root in the chest cavity he’s regrown, something that Seokmin managed to push inside of the hole he watched fill with lungs and bone. Jeonghan can feel it pressing up against his spine and nudging underneath his heart. A niggling and uncomfortable thing, already tangling with his veins and impossible to remove.

Jeonghan holds Seokmin’s chin and looks between his eyes until Seokmin smiles. It’s jagged, half a grimace, pretty eyes like amber mirrored with tears. Seokmin breathes against his lips and doesn’t let go of Jeonghan’s hand until they’re safely out of. San Jose

\---

Minghao, Junhui, Mingyu, and Soonyoung arrive during the first weeks of winter. Their house sits 15 miles from the coast of Half Moon Bay, a white speck on a green plateau slapped together with wooden siding and bottle blue windows. The lighthouse on the horizon is like a second north star situated to the west. 

“There’s enough space for Seokmin to run,” Soonyoung had said. “He is not a dog,” Jeonghan had replied.

It’s temporary, they’ve promised to take Seokmin anywhere in the world, anywhere he wants to go. Seokmin tells Jeonghan that he should pick.

Their first night in the home Seokmin retreats in on himself, following Jeonghan like a shadow through the tang of fresh paint and ancient souls screeching in the dining room. Seokmin averts his eyes from their comfortable touches, the way Mingyu kisses Jeonghan in passing as he carries a bottle of wine to the table.

“Stop kissing me, you taste like onions,” Jeonghan giggles, throwing a linen napkin at Mingyu. Mingyu catches it midair and Soonyoung points a fork in Seokmin’s direction with a mouth full of food.

“You know, Seokminnie, your Jeonghan used to be able to assassinate a man with a dinner napkin.” 

“And you know _Seokminnie_ that Soonyoung is just _asking_ me to practice on him.” Jeonghan pours his own wine, uses his first taste to mask the way he catches Seokmin’s eyes down on his untouched food. 

He remembers what it was like, to feel miniscule, to feel like a child as a grown man. The five of them are as constant as the sea, tidal and ever moving, but to be respected for the vastness and the depth. Seokmin’s entire lifespan is seconds on the clock compared to the men across from him. Junhui and Minghao, for all their effort to be unthreatening and welcoming, inspire healthy fear.

Minghao’s gaze flickers to Jeonghan placing a comforting hand on Seokmin’s wrist. Jeonghan rubs life back into him at his pulse point, and Seokmin warms at the contact. Even Junhui appears to get caught in the glare of Seokmin’s daybreak smile.

“Tell me about your home, Seokmin-ah, where you came from,” Minghao says, voice calm. “Jeonghan has written letters, but he hasn’t said much.”

“Mostly he writes about himself,” Junhui quips and Jeonghan pulls a face at him from across the table.

“Myungho-ssi, there isn’t much to tell,” Seokmin says, dropping his head respectfully. 

Minghao leans across the table to hold Seokmin’s hand between both of his own. He’s better at this, the loco parentis. Dying and coming back to life is a birth, and children in their infancy cannot fend for themselves. If Minghao and Junhui had been closer geographically to where Seokmin kept dying in the streets of Minghao's dreams, maybe Seokmin might not have had so many mended bones and layers of new skin.

“Well then you’ll not have to spare any details for the sake of time,” Minghao smiles. Seokmin is coaxed out of hiding by his round cheeks, tinkling laugh. 

He tells them of the same roads Jeonghan had walked four hundred years before. He tells him of his wedding and the color of his wife’s lips. He tells them of the taste of saltwater and the fear of the sea.

“Oh!” Soonyoung jumps. “I died the same way the first time. Same place, too. Drowning…shitty, huh?”

Jeonghan is about to tell Soonyoung to be quiet, but Seokmin laughs. 


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Really pushing the limits of the 'mild sexual content' at this point.
> 
> Thank you to [Kim](https://archiveofourown.org/users/dygonilly/pseuds/dygonilly) for being an endless source of support, inspiration, and Minghao dialogue because writing a 1000 year old man discussing war is about as difficult as you could imagine.
> 
> And thank you to [Ria](https://archiveofourown.org/users/skateboardachoo/pseuds/skateboardachoo) for holding my hand through the last week and also her work beta'ing this chapter.
> 
> [playlist](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/2cQE4Da0MG0EiqAUcIHXLL?si=DNqsJSw0QE-FtdJlFx_4_g)

______________________________________________________________________________

_Nanking_

_1457_

______________________________________________________________________________

The pungent incense in the room is suffocating as it fills his lungs. Jeonghan’s breath comes too quickly as he is laid on the mat. Long, spindly fingers on wide palms and reverent eyes caress the cage of his chest. The fingers make for the inner knots of his robes before Jeonghan catches them at the wrist. He pulls Minghao down to confront him, knocking their teeth together as he attempts a kiss. Minghao places a hand flat on his chest and weighs his body into Junhui’s at his back.

“Jeonghan,” Minghao pleads. A dozen sentences said between the consonants of his name. Junhui sighs behind, helping Minghao strip Jeonghan bare by dropping layers of cloth from his shoulders until he reveals the sheer underclothes. They peel the layers like thumbs tearing at the fragile skin of a plum, until the middle is bare, juice running down their wrists. 

Minghao touches him as if he is teaching him to be touched. As if they both haven’t had him in many ways, in many beds. Rushed, angry fits of lust that Jeonghan shivers to think of even now. The intensity of it, the way it could draw blood.

But he has never had touch so feather-light, still and perfect like a bird gliding over calm waters. Fingers dipping onto his skin the way wings dip low to catch the air, remiges touching the placid lake of Jeonghan’s belly that ripples with contact.

“Not all things are violence, Jeonghan,” Junhui promises into the curve of his neck, runs the backs of his knuckles over Jeonghan’s length until he’s shuddering, weeping for something more substantial to ease him. He holds Jeonghan’s thighs apart for Mighao like a flower, careful not to tear the petals

Minghao takes him first with such self-control that Jeonghan cannot remember where the sky belongs, where the sun makes its break. He shivers incoherently under Minghao’s tactfully placed weight, traces the protrude of Minghao’s bones through his skin where he’s only clutched them before.

Junhui takes him second, after Jeonghan is spent and fidgeting, over-ripened and Minghao tasting the sweetness. They drink the cries from Jeonghan’s lips so they can replace them with comforts. Minghao speaks the words into Jeonghan’s throat as if he is placing them there like a seed to be watered. “It’s for you. Open your eyes and look. Watch how we touch you. See how beautiful.”

He watches Minghao’s eyes as Junhui unmakes him for the second time of the night, where pleasure supersedes the path of the moon in the sky. The way Junhui looks in that moment disregards the order of nature; tells her she has been outshone.

Jeonghan doesn’t hide how the tears slip down his temples into his hair. Frightened tears. Even predators cry when they have been caught in a snare. Minghao and Junhui kiss them away as they hold him on either side.

______________________________________________________________________________

_Paris_

_1913-1914_

______________________________________________________________________________

There’s a cabaret in the 18th Arrondissement. A nook of a space, like the dust collecting under a bed where Seokmin and Jeonghan hide like keepsakes. Seokmin sings louder than the rest of the crowd to the lyrics of a song he doesn’t understand, perfectly pitched so even other patrons give him a smattering of applause. He drinks in the revelry of voices out of tune, drinks in cognac he doesn’t particularly care for. Jeonghan drinks in Seokmin.

Night blankets the city and electric light bulbs run warm. There’s the boisterous jeer of a crowd for a pianist who skips a key and Seokmin wraps an arm around Jeonghan’s shoulders to cackle into his ear. He has undone his fine shirt to the upper hem of his waistcoat, thrown his neat jacket aside, draped his tie across his shoulders. The position forces Jeonghan’s mouth against Seokmin’s naked collarbone.

Jeonghan grabs hold of his chin, forces Seokmin to watch his mouth carefully as he over enunciates the French for Seokmin to follow. Deliberately, he licks his lips and presses a thumb into the growing dimple of Seokmin’s chin, over the bottom lip of Seokmin’s growing smile. Only centimeters between their mouths, Seokmin can’t possibly see enough of his face to follow his instruction.

The purposeful arch of his lower back and the demure shuttering of his lashes are well practiced. But, Jeonghan has never wanted without  _ being  _ wanted. 

Seokmin only acts on the precedent Jeonghan has set by bringing men through their threshold for a decade. Seokmin only takes his own share of the same delights Jeonghan is a glutton for, but while Jeonghan sucks the taste off his fingertips, Seokmin politely declines what he wants until he is ravenous.

Seokmin lets a pretty French woman kiss him in the corner. She is too bold and too inebriated and Seokmin palms at her waist possessively through her uncorseted dress. Jeonghan is a captive audience to the way Seokmin is greedy with the women charmed by his bright smile and lovely voice. Forced to watch him misunderstand the implications of an encounter between strangers. 

Jeonghan walks behind them through the crooked streets with hunger pangs of his own, despite the man plastered to his side. Seokmin has a hand splayed over the nape of the woman’s neck, trips over himself to kiss her again and again as she thrusts her body weight onto him. Jeonghan is not so much larger than her, he could sigh just as softly if Seokmin were to kiss over his chest. 

They split ways in a square and a drizzling rain starts to fall. Jeonghan has never struggled with goodbyes. He puts a hand on Seokmin’s cheek, slick from the mist, warm from the alcohol, tinted red from the woman’s lipstick. “I’ll see you in the morning,” he says. 

Seokmin grins and turns enough to kiss the swell of Jeonghan’s palm. Jeonghan’s breath hitches, lipstick stains his skin. “Don’t wait up for me,” Seokmin mumbles, lips dragging against his skin, gaze never leaving Jeonghan’s. 

“You know I never do.” 

He does. Every time.

\---

Their apartment is high ceilings and decadent. There are narrow windows to a small terrace that collects loose blossoms in the air, sunshine that reflects off the gilded trim at dawn. Aside from the essential pieces of furniture the space is cavernous. Jeonghan buys Seokmin a phonograph for the sitting room, Seokmin’s bedroom is a collection of discarded shirts and silk ties.

It is their first home since San Francisco, since the bottle blue windows in Half Moon Bay. The six of them make patterns across Europe for years, showing Seokmin the warmth of Mediterranean and the chill of the North Sea. Seokmin cries into Junhui’s shoulder when they say their farewells in St. Petersburg. While Seokmin's growth is steady and strong, his sentimentality remains to a fault. 

Jeonghan wakes in early spring, in a bed that smells of Seokmin’s unwashed hair. Sharp bite and musky. He buries his head into the pillows and reaches out to where Seokmin would fit in the cascade of dawn. Sometimes they share a bed. Sometimes he wakes to Seokmin there when he’s drunk and wants to hold something warm. Sometimes he crawls into Jeonghan’s bed in the late afternoon to be tutored in his French. Sometimes he falls asleep mid-morning, after pouting about it being too cold to venture out in a Paris spring day, and tucks Jeonghan’s head under his chin under the goose feather blankets.

His bedroom doors open to the living space where Seokmin is returning home from the cafe on the corner of their apartment block. There’s water bubbling on a stove, tea leaves steeped, fine stolen teacups with daisies on the rim. Seokmin’s coat is unceremoniously dropped on the chaise where Jeonghan settles, wrapped in a blanket and nothing else. Seokmin hardly bats an eyelash at the expanses of Jeonghan’s exposed skin, and Jeonghan misses the way his cheeks would go pink at the sight.

“ _ Noona _ at the patisserie says my pronunciation is getting better.” Seokmin smiles around some sticky, citrus scented bread.

“It will get better, probably, if you don’t call her  _ noona _ to her face,” Jeonghan giggles on the rim of the porcelain cup.

Seokmin laughs deep in his throat, two parcels in his hand. “ _ Hyung _ , you’re always making fun of me.” He carries over boxes and letters, wrapped in a nondescript brown packaging and covered with postage, and sets them on the cushion near Jeonghan’s bare leg.

“Don’t make it so easy for me, then. What are those?”

“From Myungho- _ hyung _ and Junhui- _ hyung _ ,” he says, still working out the pronunciation of Minghao’s name. “After all this time. I thought they hadn’t received my letters.” 

He perches beside Jeonghan and Jeonghan wraps his arms and half of the blanket around Seokmin’s middle. There’s the chill of the morning on the material of Seokmin’s blue striped shirt, and it’s chased away with the warmth of Jeonghan’s torso. He rests his chin on Seokmin’s shoulder, breathes in the mint soap on his neck, watches the way Seokmin’s sharp jaw flexes at his soft breath. 

Jeonghan has taken notes, catalogued volumes of the reactions he can draw from Seokmin -- his neck is particularly sensitive, Jeonghan makes every excuse to put his mouth as near it as he can.

Seokmin reads aloud:

_ Seokmin, _

_ I hope you are both enjoying Paris. Perhaps we will visit you soon. I would tell you both to stay out of trouble, but that would be fruitless. I will settle on telling you to stay safe. Enclosed are two small gifts for you. Smaller package from me and larger from both of us.  _

_ Minghao  _

_ P.S. The gifts are for  _ _ Seokmin _ _. Jeonghan, I know you are reading over his shoulder. They are not for you. _

Seokmin laughs out loud, clapping his hands together at the postscript. Jeonghan grumbles, Minghao’s supposed mysticism both grating and enviable. The letter flutters through the air and Jeonghan catches the edge to read a second postscript in less fine calligraphy:

_ P.P.S. Junhui here now, the sword is mostly from me. Don’t tell.  _

With delicate fingers, Seokmin unwraps his gifts as if he’s afraid to tear the packaging. Jeonghan does little to hide his sneer, or to not look put out at having not received anything. Seokmin hardly notices.

The first package contains an art book, leather bound and dark green. Inside are pages of lessons, small printed replicas of the great works the size of postage stamps. Seokmin flicks through the pages eagerly, then glances at the corner where half a dozen stolen paintings are swathed in canvas sheets, waiting to be sold back into the market once suspicions subside.

“This ought to come in handy,” Seokmin chuckles, tapping the book on Jeonghan’s knee where it peeks out from under the blanket. 

“Somehow I don’t think that’s what Minghao had in mind,” Jeonghan says dryly. Seokmin winks and it hits him straight in his core.

“Ah, but we’re liberating them,” Seokmin argues. “People deserve to see them. I think Myungho- _ hyung _ would approve.”

Jeonghan snickers into Seokmin’s ear. “Whatever helps you sleep at night.”

The second package is a maroon leather case, long and with fine enamel clasps. Seokmin smooths his hands over the dimpled material and smiles in bewilderment. 

True to his word, Junhui has sent Seokmin a sword. 

It’s an ancient thing, made of glittering white jade in both sheath and hilt, a pea green braided tassel containing beads of purple amethyst like fat shining grapes on a vine. With careful hands he inspects the weapon, touching with his fingertips as if he’ll soil the cloud white with dirty palms. When he extracts the blade, there’s a hush sound of metal on stone, and the mirror of the steel catches his wide eyes. In another life Jeonghan would carry something like this in lieu of a rifle, though not nearly as finely made, and with not nearly as precious materials. 

Seokmin’s entire body shakes with a shuddering sigh as he turns the sword in the grey light of the morning sun. Jeonghan slides arms from his belly up towards his chest, press palms into his sternum to remind him that he’s there.

“I can’t accept this,” Seokmin whispers. 

“I’m not sure it can be returned.” Jeonghan’s voice is more vitriolic than he means it to be. His chilly nose runs up along the tendon in Seokmin’s neck. There’s no reaction.

“I’m not...I don’t deserve something like this.”

The blade is a stark contrast to the gold watch on Seokmin’s wrist. It cost more Francs than they had at the time, but Seokmin’s eyes had gotten fixed on it in a shop window. Jeonghan broke three fingers attempting to set it free of its glass enclosure. The links are pure gold, face an iridescent opal, it keeps perfect time with the bells of the chapel at the end of the road.

“It’s impractical these days regardless of what Minghao would have you think swinging around his two blades,” Jeonghan hums. “But it is pretty. We can have it mounted.”

Seokmin laughs like a breath he’s been holding. “You’re right. I don’t know anything about swordsmanship.”

Jeonghan traces Seokmin’s forearm up to his wrist with fingers dipped into the defined line of his muscle. He guides Seokmin to put the sword into its sheath. “I can teach you,” he says with a cloaked grin.

“ _ Hyung _ , I appreciate it, but your teaching methods are terrifying.” Seokmin turns to face Jeonghan and the pointed top of his nose brushes against where Jeonghan’s is scrunched with laughter. There’s the near imperceptible flicker of Seokmin’s eyelashes. A twitch, a reflex. His dark eyes drift downwards to Jeonghan’s mouth and back up again. Under Jeonghan’s palms on Seokmin’s chest, there’s the undeniable thud of his heart just a beat out of pace.

He extricates himself from Jeonghan’s hold without a second glance, leaving Jeonghan dejected on the chaise.

“I should go write Myungho- _ hyung _ a reply.”

\---

Between lulls of lazy afternoons, there are nights of frantic debauchery. Their “business contacts” hide in the shadows of Paris like predators in the grass. Easy to spot once you’ve been taught where to look. To maintain appearances they attend their soirées, though Jeonghan doesn’t consider it much of a chore.

There’s something to be said about hazy, smoke filled rooms, a crush of bodies, and a band playing too loud. The flat is paint-chipped walls and a collection of fine sofas, loose floorboards and romanticism. People who don’t look twice at Jeonghan draping himself on Seokmin’s lap like a fainting couch, his back plastered to Seokmin’s solid chest.

There’s a late spring snow drifting in the windows, but the room is humid with bodies. Jeonghan swims in drunkenness like a shallow pond, floating and content. His shirt is improperly unbuttoned and Seokmin’s clammy palm rests over his belly, middle and ring finger pads touching the edge of revealed skin. On the low table in front of them, a man acts like a chemist preparing the unnaturally green liquid they’re supposed to drink.

“It seems like a lot of work for one drink,” Seokmin laughs, high and happy, and Jeonghan’s head jostles as if his spine has liquified in the fire of too much alcohol. 

“Seokminnie,” Jeonghan whines. “It’s an experience. Stop being so afraid of everything.” 

“You know I try anything when you talk me into it.”

They clink their tiny glasses together and the sound blends with their laughter. Seokmin blanches at the taste, sticks out his tongue and shakes his head like a dog. Jeonghan pushes at his shoulder with an impolite snort and Seokmin dramatically reels backwards into the couch from it.

It’s been months of this. The slow seep of alcohol in their bones and Seokmin touching in ways he shouldn’t and Jeonghan bending into it like a magnet to its pole. They’re a mess of limbs on the sofa and Jeonghan nuzzles a cheek against Seokmin’s overheated chest. The gentle rise and fall of his rib cage is like an ocean wave and the jazz music swirls until Jeonghan is suspended on the surface of his sea, anchored by the sickly feeling in his stomach that makes him desperate for Seokmin to touch his body.

He has never felt hunger eat at him the way it does now. 

There were short-lived moments of desire, certainly. Years where Minghao’s stoicism became a challenge to break, where he’d let his thighs be bared on their horses until the pale of his skin shone the sunlight and Minghao was forced to look. Months of beating Mingyu and his family’s heirloom sword down into the dirt into until his pristine robes were soiled, deliberately settling his lithe body over the heft of Mingyu’s frame, letting Mingyu understand how much he wanted him regardless of how he spoke to him.

The little games begin to feel silly when Seokmin unknowingly outplays his hand. When Seokmin crawls into his bed and lets his fingers dip too low on Jeonghan’s stomach, when he sings love songs in time with the recorded voice on the phonograph into Jeonghan’s ear after dinner. When he has him like he does now, body draped over his, skin demurely exposed to touch at his own will, Jeonghan submissive to his whim. It is not the game he knows.

Seokmin’s hands wander up the bowed expanse of Jeonghan’s back into the shaggy hair at the crown of his head. Jeonghan traces the defined cross-cross of his abdominal muscles, through the valley of his broad chest to the pool of gathering sweat between his collarbones. Sound halts for Jeonghan like time halts for him, shapeless and endless until all he can hear are the deep, needy breaths tumbling out of Seokmin’s parted lips. The tip of his nose moves across Jeonghan’s hairline, Cupid’s bow dragging across his wet brow, heavy breathing making Jeonghan’s eyelashes flutter.

Jeonghan is no longer lying in wait, no longer playing his game covertly. He has lost his grace. He has been running full sprint towards a destination that moves before he can reach it. 

This is not the first time Jeonghan has pulled a ragged breath from Seokmin’s throat when he pushes his hand high on Seokmin’s thigh. It’s not the first time he’s seen Seokmin fiddling with thoughts as he watches Jeonghan’s tongue darting out between his lips to catch errant drops of liquor.

Jeonghan glances upwards and Seokmin is already looking down with heavy lidded eyes. It’s not the first time. 

But, it is the first time Seokmin is bold enough to touch Jeonghan’s flushed cheek with the backs of his fingers. It is the first time he drifts his flat fingernails over the plush of Jeonghan’s bottom lip. 

“Please kiss me,” Jeonghan whispers.  _ Please _ . He’s limbs ache from running, where he’s trying to go is only a few inches from the end of his nose. Seokmin’s incandescent bulb smile is all he can see from how close he’s drifted down towards him.

“I want to,” Seokmin whispers back. “Can I?”

Jeonghan surges in on him like a violent gust of wind. One hand clutches at the back of Seokmin’s neck, the other fists into his shirt, and Seokmin makes a heavy noise through his lips. He tastes like absinthe, like licorice, spicy and sweet. Jeonghan licks the flavor off his tongue and Seokmin’s hands settle on his shoulders and holds him close.

His senses are dulled and he’s grateful, because Jeonghan has kissed numerous times. This makes him feel unknowable. Strange. So much so that he must pull away so he can breathe and Seokmin chases his mouth with a soft, dazed laugh.

“I’m sorry,” Seokmin says, leaning away once he’s opened his eyes. Jeonghan hides his trembling hands in his hair as he pushes it back off his forehead. 

He smiles like his cheeks are heavy. “It took you long enough.”

He hides behind his wit, Seokmin sacrifices himself to his honesty.

“I have wanted you,” Seokmin breathes. “For so long.” He looks between Jeonghan’s eyes, cups his cheek and edges his thumb against the corner of Jeonghan’s eyelashes. The words hit Jeonghan like a bullet, precise and scorching, a clean shot to the heart, it will be difficult for his body to push back out. 

“Have you?” he smirks, Seokmin smiling in reflection.

“I was afraid you didn’t want me.” 

Jeonghan responds by kissing him again, only this time he crawls into Seokmin’s lap, settles over the thickness of his left thigh. Seokmin is forced to tip his head back, and Jeonghan is thankful to have control. 

\---

Jeonghan teaches Seokmin how to have sex the same way he teaches him to use a gun. Practical. Functional. Finger. Trigger. Breathe. Pull.

Days have become educational and Seokmin commits himself to his studies much more rigorously than he does languages. From the beginning it's achingly slow, led by curiosity and a structured curriculum. An academic evaluation of the planes of Jeonghan’s skin, careful auditory research of the keening sounds Jeonghan makes when he’s touched the way he wants to be touched.

“I’ve never…” Seokmin gasps out with Jeonghan’s mouth around him. “With a man.  _ Hyung _ , show me how.”

Jeonghan demonstrates to him where fingers should curl, how wet they should be with oil, when to extract them and replace them. Seokmin shakes in his arms when he finally breaches him.

There’s been nearly twenty years of observation on Jeonghan’s part. The way Seokmin is impossibly passionate, raw like an exposed nerve. The way Seokmin won’t do anything by half measures. The way Seokmin holds women and kisses women and makes love to them knowing he’ll never see them again. He shouldn’t have expected this to be any different. But he does and it shocks him down to his core to be proven otherwise.

Seokmin envelops him in brawny arms and sweat-damp bed sheets. He moves inside him like he’s seeking out the answer to a question only Jeonghan can provide. Eyes trained on his eyes, watching him with subtle awe, synchronized reactions to the subtlest changes in Jeonghan’s face. 

The feeling is potent. Addictive. Seokmin kisses soft cries out of his mouth and chants his name like it is religion, like Jeonghan is a deity and Seokmin has devoted himself to daily worship. It becomes that way. Seokmin wants to have him all hours of the day, in all the ways Jeonghan can supply. Jeonghan is sometimes merciful despite himself. 

Merciful when he kisses down the column of Seokmin’s spine the first time he works Seokmin open to take him. Gentle as he keeps Seokmin’s broad chest pinned to the bed, his hips raised as Seokmin cries overwrought tears and begs him for more, chokes on his happiness when Jeonghan confirms that he’s good, that he’s perfect, that he feels so good.

In the softer moments, on dog day afternoons and when blossoms on the terrace become dark brown leaves, Seokmin is tender and possessive. Seokmin holds onto Jeonghan like Jeonghan is trying to escape, moves languid and purposeful until Jeonghan throat goes hoarse. They laugh their way around moments with Jeonghan’s cheek up against the kitchen wall, until the laughter dies down and Seokmin moves so deeply in him that Jeonghan cries and Seokmin holds him while he trembles on the floor when they’re through. Jeonghan forgets his own name in the softer moments, forgets long stretches of time and relinquishes control.

In frenzies, he yanks it back. He pushes Seokmin into his bed - their bed now - and holds a hand over his mouth while he rides him, so they don’t wake the neighbors. Jeonghan holds Seokmin down, forcing him to stasis with his mouth, his hands. Moments where Jeonghan holds Seokmin’s arms behind his back while fucks him into the rug in their living room, wine stain blooming from where Seokmin had knocked a glass from the table. Razor's edge moments where Seokmin has tears welling in pleading eyes, Jeonghan leaving his mark on, and underneath, Seokmin’s skin. 

And it  _ scares _ Jeonghan to not want anyone else. It’s terrifying that when they part ways for an evening he thinks of Seokmin moving inside him rather than the man on top of him. He pushes himself to have other people as if it’s a training exercise.

Junhui and Minghao explained to him long ago that if he learned how to lose in a fight, the pain wasn’t overwhelming. Jeonghan let himself be injured, gasping around blood in his throat so he could keep swinging a sword without waiting for the wound to close.

For all his efforts teaching Seokmin how to understand pain, Seokmin never learns to respect it the way Jeonghan has. Seokmin doesn’t need to choke on the blood the way Jeonghan did. Seokmin waits for Jeonghan to come home, curls around him when he smells like another man’s bed. 

He proudly wears the half-moon imprints of Jeonghan’s teeth in his shoulders - purple like the amethyst baubles of the sword mounted above the fireplace. The marks fade so quickly. Jeonghan wishes they would stay.

\---

They walk side by side on the Seine two weeks before Christmas. Snow falls from the pitch black night sky, appearing and glittering in the streetlights as if by magic. It's well past midnight, peaceful, and the city is empty. The eerie feeling of silence replaced by the comfort of solitude. Their tracks in the snow on the cobblestone bank are the only sign of life.

“ _ Hyung _ , can I ask you a question?” Seokmin asks, puff hot air escaping his mouth in a swirl of steam. Snowflakes catch on the brim of his hat, on his scarf tucked under his lips. 

“Mm?”

Seokmin wrings his gloved hands. “Do...do I measure up? Comparatively?” 

“Elaborate?” Jeonghan laughs. 

“You’ll be five hundred years old in a few years...” Seokmin starts, anxiety making him hesitate. 

Jeonghan has lived a hundred lifetimes before Seokmin. It’s not surprising that he thinks of mortals as children, as  _ Seokmin _ as a child. Small, insignificant, ignorant. But Seokmin is not a child. He has come to realize it in the last decade. Seokmin is not insignificant.

He takes Seokmin’s hand, bumps their shoulders together, gives him a coquettish grin. “Are you concerned that you’re inadequate?”

Seokmin shrugs, collapsing in on himself regardless of the humor Jeonghan tries to supply to ease his worry. “Would you be surprised? I hardly know what I’m doing compared to you.”

Jeonghan squeezes his hand. “Why are you so afraid to talk to me? Haven’t I shown you can trust me?”

“Of course,” Seokmin rushes out. “Of course. I just...Jeonghan- _ hyung _ , when you touch me I -- nobody touches me the way you do. You didn’t even have to learn what I wanted you just --”

“I had to learn,” Jeonghan says in a lapse of honesty. It takes him by surprise. “I learned. We all learn.” 

Seokmin stops, and the snow drops from the sky so lightly that it floats before falling. “It doesn’t feel that way. I just...don’t want to embarrass myself.”

Seokmin is bashful when he doesn’t need to be. High cheekbones turned cherry blossom pink in the wintery air and perfectly painted profile silhouetted by humming street lamps on the road. Seokmin smiles until his eyes squint up, shy and nervous and boyish.

“You’re not embarrassing yourself. Trust me. You’re a very dedicated student.”

Jeonghan guides him backwards, under the arch of a bridge. It provides cover from the snowfall, leaving them insulated and dry as he rests against the wall, Seokmin’s hands coming to enclose him. The smile on his cheeks reveals the dimple on his chin and he pulls off his hat to reveal day-old pomade hair. He puts one gloved hand under Jeonghan’s chin to steady him for a kiss.

“Maybe I’m a fool for it,” he says against his mouth. “But I’d spend another thirty centuries learning from you.”

“Oh? I thought you said my teaching methods were scary?” Jeonghan lets his fingers make easy work of the buttons of Seokmin’s coat, pushes himself inside it so he can dip fingers under Seokmin’s waistband. 

“You have a frighteningly good memory.”

“When it counts.”

“Not just sex.” He delicately takes Jeonghan’s wrist away from his lower body, clutches his hand and presses it close to his chest where Jeonghan can feel his harshly beating heart. “All of it. Everything. Living forever used to scare me.” There is more to the sentence, Jeonghan knows there is. In lieu of speaking Seokmin ends his thought with prolonged stare, a kiss to the tops of Jeonghan’s knuckles.

There is a chasm swallowing them both whole now that they’ve fallen in. From the edge they couldn’t see the bottom, but once they stepped off the side, they still managed to have misjudged the depth. Jeonghan braces himself in the free-fall, Seokmin looks so sure as he leans in to kiss Jeonghan again. 

Jeonghan keeps his eyes open through it. There’s the initial placidity of Seokmin’s handsome face with the press of chilly lips. Jeonghan wraps cold arms around Seokmin’s warm middle. There’s the draw of Seokmin’s brows, they settle into calm again. A drumbeat rhythm of Seokmin’s heart, the whisper sound of snowfall.

Seokmin kisses him until he’s coaxed into a state of reverie, until the repercussions of being vulnerable to him seem far away and irrelevant. His fingers flexing and unflexing on Seokmin’s back, being kissed until his eyes slide shut. It feels a little like falling asleep, the gentle lull of comfort and the last touches of reality.

Jeonghan pulls Seokmin by his hips insistently, deflecting. Seokmin is so close to sinking too far down, to the silt that’s settled deep into him, and he does what he can to yank Seokmin back up to the surface. 

Seokmin pulls his mouth away and grins. “Can’t you wait until we’re home?”

“No.” Jeonghan makes a show of sticking out his bottom lip and makes his best attempt at puppy-dog eyes. 

Seokmin shakes his head and lifts his finger to brush the errant strands of hair from Jeonghan’s face. Even through the leather he can feel the radiant warmth of Seokmin’s skin over his. That coupled with the way Seokmin scans his features with a smirk makes him shiver. He tries to tell himself it’s the cold.

“I’m not having sex with you in the street,” Seokmin snorts. “It’s too cold.”

“Oh, is that the only reason?” Jeonghan furrows his brows to punctuate the sarcasm.

Seokmin dips to kiss him again, pins Jeonghan’s wrists above his head like he cannot be trusted not to touch. His teeth are cold after being exposed to the air. Seokmin smiles too much for his own good. 

Jeonghan tracks memories by events. Keeping time after four centuries is tedious and difficult. Even mortals lose entire days, weeks, years. They have something in common with Jeonghan - especially with Minghao and Junhui - memories find themselves encapsulated in the briefest moment like a photograph. 

There’s a photograph of Seokmin in the sitting room, taken by Mingyu before they left New York. He’s half turned towards the camera, a perfect capture of his delicate, sharp nose. 

The night under the bridge by the Seine loses color over the years but is fixed in time. 

Seokmin’s blunt eyelashes latticed with snowflakes and a frosted smile. Jeonghan’s hair mussed against the stone wall as Seokmin kisses him dizzy. The lamp light and the meander of the river. The way Jeonghan’s heart pounds so hard it makes him shake because he knows what this feeling is. 

\---

Months go by in comfortable monotony. Jeonghan has a complex relationship with the passage of time anyways. Every now and then he blinks, and a decade has passed, sometimes the years drag on.

Mornings begin in bed, speckled sunlight in shafts through the windows, Seokmin content not to have him on certain mornings, content just to kiss his cheeks and hold him through lucidity. In the afternoons, Seokmin feeds the stray dogs on the way to the park at the end of the road, they dance in the sitting room to the records on the phonograph, Seokmin goes to the market for fresh bread. In the evenings, they watch acrobats and vaudeville acts in the cabaret. They walk the streets when no one else is around, take in the sights in peace.

Nights like these – where they stay in their flat - are tranquil. Seokmin cooking in the kitchen, shirt sleeves rolled to his elbows, pinching his lips as he parses a recipe card. He joins Jeonghan on the terrace while the sun sets with a glass of a rich man’s stolen wine in either hand. Below them cars move serpentine through narrow streets and it’s deceiving considering the news from the front, the war that rages in the country.

Seokmin kisses patterns over Jeonghan’s shoulders. “We should buy a car,” he says thoughtfully.

“Why?” Jeonghan laughs into his wine. “You’re a terrible driver.”

When he spins in Seokmin’s arms, Seokmin is frowning and Jeonghan giggles in half-apology. Seokmin pushes him back against the iron-work railing, kissing the corners of his mouth.

“This is a nice vintage,” he hums, licking over the top row of Jeonghan’s teeth. “We should send a thank you note.”

“Don’t act like you know anything about wine.”

He’s got Seokmin in place by the edges of his undershirt - narrow straps on his shoulders, tight around his chest. Jeonghan’s mouth goes dry each time he notices the strength hardly contained in Seokmin’s frame, as if somehow, he forgets how chiseled he is until he sees him, feels him. Golden sun on his tan skin catching like the gilded trim in the sitting room.

“Supper will get cold,” Seokmin whispers, though he doesn’t move away. He holds Jeonghan against the balcony edge, lathes the salt-sweat taste off his pulse in his neck. Jeonghan sighs and pushes at Seokmin’s lower back until their hips meet. Seokmin responds with a grunt and by pulling up Jeonghan’s right leg to wrap around his waist. Jeonghan clings to him.

“Be careful or I’ll fall off the edge,” he scolds, tipping his head back so Seokmin can move to mouth at center of his throat. He can feel Seokmin’s teeth revealed by a smile as he rucks up against him.

He has half a mind to push Seokmin on to the chair to their left, strip down and take him right there on the balcony for anyone to see. He’s deliberating the logistics of it when he opens his eyes and sees Junhui string back at him in the door frame. 

Seokmin freezes when Jeonghan tenses up and Junhui is giving them a curious and knowing smirk. Jeonghan attempts his most casual smile, removing his leg from Seokmin’s waist and initiating a respectable distance. Junhui just quirks an eyebrow.

“Did you break in?” Jeonghan accuses. He’s more breathless than he expects to sound, and he wipes the evidence of Seokmin’s mouth from his neck.

“We tried knocking, but you must have been preoccu – “

Seokmin cuts Junhui off by pulling their bodies together and it’s fruitless to attempt speaking in one of Seokmin’s bone-crushing hugs. Junhui returns it with a strained laugh.

“ _ Hyung _ ,” Seokmin crackles with laughter and excitement. “You’re here. Where’s Myungho- _ hyung _ ?”

Junhui tries to answer, but Jeonghan puts up a finger. “French please. He needs to practice.”

“He’s inside.”

Minghao is more mythological being in a fashionable suit than he is a man standing in their sitting room. He takes in his surroundings in quiet contemplation, hands clasped behind his back, spindly torso proud and unmoving as he gives Seokmin a warm smile. Seokmin bows his head, silly formality.

Minghao laughs it off and pulls Seokmin into an embrace, pushes him away slightly to check him over as if scanning for injuries. Jeonghan claps Junhui’s back as they walk through the threshold of the window to the indoors. He pecks Junhui on the cheek as Junhui whispers into his ear. “You’ve been up to your tricks, hm?”

Jeonghan catches Minghao staring over Seokmin’s shoulder. Minghao is, for the most part, unreadable unless he is deliberately making his feelings known. This is a look that says  _ I saw you two. I am not surprised. _ The lack of shock from either of them makes Jeonghan furious in a way he is deeply familiar with. The two of them make him feel like he’s the butt of a joke they’ve been making for ages at his expense. Jeonghan shrugs Junhui off, rolls his eyes, stomps off to the kitchen while Seokmin fills the room with stories.

There was never any sense in having a dining set before, so they eat on the floor at the coffee table the way they’re all comfortable. The windows are swung open, letting in the cooling summer air, and Seokmin apologizes no less than fifteen times for the quality of the savory pie he’s created - regardless of the continued reassurance that he is successful.

“I see you’ve mounted the sword,” Junhui says as they pass around a bottle of brandy after the meal. 

Seokmin turns towards the mantle and smiles wistfully. “It’s the most incredible thing I’ve ever seen. I can’t thank you enough.” He pauses to bow his head to both of them again. “I’m afraid to fight with it honestly. I don’t really know how.”

Across the table, Minghao has let himself rest against the edge of the sofa, long legs spread out on the wooden floor. He twists his glass on his knee, smiling fondly as Junhui explains the different styles of swordsmanship he could teach Seokmin before the end of the week. 

“All good swords have a name,” Junhui claims. 

“That is not true,” Jeonghan scoffs.

“It is,” Junhui insists.

“Minghao hasn’t named his.”

“Minghao just hasn’t told you what they’re named.”

“Oh?” Jeonghan snickers. “Is that it? Has he even told  _ you _ ?”

Seokmin interrupts them. “ _ Molan _ . I think.”

_ Peony _ .

Minghao hums. “That’s a good name. Pretty.”

There are strings coming from the phonograph, a song Jeonghan has heard Seokmin sing a hundred times, danced with him to. Under the table Seokmin tries to take Jeonghan’s hand and Jeonghan pulls away. Minghao and Junhui’s eyes flick down to track the quick motion, then towards Seokmin, and Jeonghan doesn’t turn to see what they’ve seen.

“I take it this isn’t just a social visit,” Jeonghan laughs to distract them.

“No,” Junhui presses his lips into a line meant to be a smile. “I’m sure even on sabbatical you’ve picked up a newspaper?”

Jeonghan switches to wine, pours himself a glass. “It’s a little hard to ignore a war when it’s at your door.”

Seokmin looks between the three with concern. “Is it really so bad?”

Minghao gives Jeonghan a disapproving look meant to say  _ haven’t you told him? _ Seokmin glances between their wordless exchange.

“No war is good,” Jeonghan rolls his eyes. “They’re all the same, though. Pointless. Especially this one.”

“Not all of them are pointless,” Junhui cautions. “Some have more purpose than others.” He turns to Seokmin. “We help where we can to make them end faster. Sometimes Jeonghan helps if he’s bored.”

Seokmin pours his another glass, eyebrows set into discernable worry. Jeonghan has spoken about the Western front as little as possible. He knows what it will mean if Seokmin comes to understand the scope of it.

“There was a war when I left home,” Seokmin says quietly. “I guess I should get used to seeing more wars than the average person.”

“Picture a dam, Seokmin,” Minghao starts. “Full. Controlled. Every now and then it rains hard enough for the dam to overflow and it’s manageable. Then one day, it storms so hard that the dam crumbles. The forest bends and breaks and the earth is saturated. It feels as though the world will be underwater forever.”

Jeonghan shakes his head at the pontificating, but Seokmin attentively watches Minghao trace the ghost of circular tea stains on the coffee table. 

“Then the water dries, the trees grow back, we rebuild the dam,” Minghao continues. “A storm will come again eventually. That is war. It’s a cyclical thing.”

There is silence between songs on the record, a crackle, and the music swells again. Jeonghan can see the resolve settling into Seokmin’s sharp features, the naive bravery Jeonghan thought he left behind in San Francisco. The very reason he’d hoped to keep Seokmin blissfully unaware of the violence encroaching on their home.

“Are we going? Is that why you’re here?” Seokmin asks and Junhui brightens. There’s hardly any distance between the two older men; shoulder, knee, wrist in comfortable attachment. They glance between each other and Seokmin drinks the rest of his brandy in a single sip. 

They’ll leave for the front in a few days where Soonyoung and Mingyu are already apparently establishing supply lines. Jeonghan resentfully agrees to go for nothing else but to keep an eye on Seokmin and to not miss out on a fight. Seokmin thrums with misplaced excitement. 

They drink for so long into the night that dawn is chasing the stars when Junhui falls asleep on the sofa in the sitting room. Minghao sighs, carries him into Seokmin’s bedroom, gives a kiss on the cheek to Seokmin and Jeonghan as a goodnight so he doesn’t wake the man in his arms.

Seokmin’s fingers drum on his leg and he stares across the room to the still open window, thumb between his teeth, lost in thought.

“Are you afraid?” Jeonghan asks and Seokmin startles. There’s a well-placed distance between them on the chaise.

“I’m not a soldier. I’m not sure what to expect.”

“We don’t have to go,” Jeonghan offers. “You and I, we can go someplace else.”

Seokmin seems to consider it for beat, turning over the possibilities in his mind. The sun is edging on the horizon, a tangy orange glow over the edges of the rooftops and chimneys.

“I think. Maybe what’s happened to me isn’t just…” Seokmin sighs, sliding his body closer to Jeonghan’s. It’s already warm in the room from the August heat, Seokmin’s skin is sweltering. “Don’t you think you’ve been made to be this way for a reason?”

No. Jeonghan doesn’t. He doesn’t swear allegiances to any gods. He doesn’t see the purpose in tying strings between events to discover a secret meaning. Life is life and it passes in chaos. And if there is nothing to be gained by it, then there is no point in saving it.

He should have expected this conversation could come.

“You’re not well suited for war,” Jeonghan says seriously. “You have no idea what it’ll be like.”

“How do you know?” Seokmin argues, lips clamped shut. There’s no anger there, but there’s a flash of an emotion akin to hurt. As if Jeonghan is clipping his wings. As if Jeonghan wasn’t the one to show him how to use them in the first place.

They tumble into tense silence and after long enough Jeonghan decides to leave Seokmin on the couch for his own bed. He takes off his shirt, then pants and falls against the pillows, resigned. Certain lessons can’t be verbalized, that was always his methodology. He’s not sure why he’s so committed to having Seokmin learn this one without practical application.

Seokmin comes to bed when Jeonghan is half awake, over an hour later. His weight against Jeonghan’s back yanks him back from the boundaries of sleep. They are skin to skin beneath the sheet, Seokmin smells like sweat and brandy.

“There’s no place for this in the battlefield,” Jeonghan warns. “You can’t have me like this out there.” Seokmin tries to turn him, but Jeonghan shakes out of his arms. “I mean it, Seokmin.”

“Then let me have it,” Seokmin sighs. “Just one more time, then. I’m sorry.” He kisses sweet apologies into Jeonghan’s hair, over the back of his ear. “I’m sorry. I won’t change my mind.”

They hold a palm over each other’s mouths so Minghao and Junhui won’t be alerted. It’s a quiet thing, a heady thing. Seokmin stabs bruises with his fingers into Jeonghan’s thighs, they disappear as quickly as he makes them, but they ache nonetheless as they heal. Seokmin tests Jeonghan’s regeneration ability, determined to make this time count.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [my twitter](https://twitter.com/lithomancy)
> 
> [kim's twitter](https://twitter.com/dygonilly)


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter is super long yeesh.
> 
> As always, thank you to [Kim](https://archiveofourown.org/users/dygonilly/pseuds/dygonilly) for working through the story with me. And thank you to [Ria](https://archiveofourown.org/users/skateboardachoo/pseuds/skateboardachoo) for beta-ing.
> 
> Playlist is [here](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/2cQE4Da0MG0EiqAUcIHXLL?si=2_IcaZ5jQJeYgdeSuw9Dhg).

______________________________________________________________________________

_Milan_

_1493_

______________________________________________________________________________

The sun has set and Minghao shoots up from the bed with a scream. 

Jeonghan hardly has enough time to dress. He forgoes the laces on his breeches, throws a linen shirt over his head, shoves his bow and quiver onto his shoulders. He chases after Minghao as he frantically runs through the house, begging him to explain his panic.

Minghao clutches at his stomach once they reach the stable door. He doubles over, face contorted in pain as he swears. With a shuddering breath, he glances upwards, staring at the dark sky like he’s asking it an unanswerable question.

Minghao blinks once, twice, and then turns to Jeonghan with the eyes of a helpless child. Atypical fear, fleeting as it is, and Jeonghan is struck dumb as Minghao hardens with resolve while he hoists himself over the back of his unsaddled horse.

Jeonghan has so much of Junhui’s blood on his hands he thinks they will never be clean again. He presses his fingers together like the woman in the painting hanging in the antechamber of their home, hands in prayer to a God that isn’t listening. The tacky congealed blood makes the pads of his fingertips stick together. 

“ _Bǎobèi_ ,” Minghao whispers. There is an ooze of blood that drips from where their chests press together, steadily reducing as the hole in Junhui’s stomach mends itself. The blood runs through the cobblestones like a river accommodates the rocks, the earth. Junhui clutches Minghao tightly as they sway to and fro on the balls of their feet - two moored boats in the middle of the river.

Jeonghan watches from the bank, unable to cross to where they float.

“I’m alright,” Junhui insists. “Just bandits. They snuck up on me.”

There is a thread connecting them. Jeonghan knows. It’s tied around the core of their hearts, tangled through their bodies like the lacework of their veins. The shared pain that he will never feel. 

A thorough reminder that they have come into the world together. Counterweights, who share the balance of eternity in equal measure and tip high when the other falls low. A thorough reminder that Jeonghan was not born for anyone. Jeonghan carries the weight alone.

Minghao’s composure finds him again and his hands are steady as he watches Junhui’s body succeed in a miracle. Junhui excitedly smiles down at his own skin, stitching itself and passing rapidly through the phases of healing like the phases of the moon - empty, mended, scarred, pure. 

They kiss like they are grateful and Jeonghan refuses to look.

____________________________________________________________________________

_Chicago_

_1920-1929_

______________________________________________________________________________

Jeonghan’s vantage point gives him an unobstructed view of the lines and lines of warehouse windows on Pershing Road. He puts one hand on the crank torch at his left, flicks out a message like the key to a telegraph: S-T-R-A-I-G-H-T. He looks through the sight of his trusty M1903 Springfield - a souvenir from the war.

Seokmin is in a simple black pair of trousers and white pressed shirt, hair coiffed in the popular style, appearing like a fashion advertisement as he moves, gun drawn through the guts of a dark warehouse. He glances towards the window and motions for the door ahead, then mouths to where he knows Jeonghan is perched:  _ How many _ ?

Jeonghan lets an icy blast of wind rustle his hair, breathing as it passes, and then takes his first shot. Clean through the eye socket of a police officer smoking a cigarette against the wall of the office space.

F-I-V-E

Even through his telescopic sight, Seokmin’s smile is blinding.

He kicks in the door with one powerful motion. Gun fire flashes in the dark room and a man in the room drops to the floor. Seokmin gracelessly runs shoulder first at another. The momentum knocks the first man into his companion, the latter of which Jeonghan hits directly between the eyes before he hits the ground. Seokmin turns towards the window to wink before a fist collides with the side of his face.

Seokmin finds happiness in all things. This includes when he takes a punch to the jaw. He plants himself deep, takes the jab without a flinch, spits out cracked tooth like an afterthought. When he swings, he lacks finesse but explodes with lethal force. And Jeonghan watches his clumsy dance with a smile on his face, with adrenaline dashing in his blood, with the desire to have Seokmin take his shoulders in unkind hands and slam him up against the wall the way he does his opponent. 

Jeonghan takes a steadying breath as he chambers another round. Bullet casings sound like piano keys as they hit the roof tiles, pulse point in his finger on the trigger like a steady beating drum.

When he looks back through the sight there are only three officers left. Their target is cowering under a desk, the other two are focused on Seokmin. One of them, the bald one, has Seokmin’s arms held back and the other, the skinny one, hits him continuously in the face. Jeonghan snorts at the sight of Seokmin teeth red with blood. Seokmin smiles at his opponent and then he spits out the excess on his shoe.

Jeonghan can see them exchange words, and the skinny one leans down  _ just _ enough for Seokmin to smash his forehead straight into his face. It sends him reeling and an opportunity opens. Seokmin leans down the heft of his upper body, using the weight of the bald one detaining him to his detriment. The man falls face first on the ground with a visible crack and Seokmin puts a bullet through the back of his skull. 

The skinny one approaches from behind and Jeonghan takes his third shot of the evening. It’s a messy spray of blood, due to the way the man is mid-motion, but it makes him collapse, nonetheless. Seokmin, ever so thorough, puts a bullet through his skull to match his friend’s.

He turns towards the window again and mouths:  _ You’re getting sloppy. _

Even from this distance he can see the mud from the River Somme under Seokmin’s fingernails. Some things you can’t ever scrub away. He fists two hands into their target’s shirt, drags him into his blood begotten office chair, and shoves the muzzle of a gun straight into his face.

Jeonghan can’t make out what Seokmin says, but he knows the harrowing curl of his shoulders. The temper he’d been hiding until the start of the war in 1914, rising out of him once more. It’s risen out of him more since the war ended. That Seokmin will no longer stand for men in power who cast their eyes away from injustice.

It’s nothing to do with the way they take money from Italians smuggling alcohol in the warehouse below. It’s everything to do with the way they take money from men smuggling girls into whorehouses.

Seokmin’s perfectly combed hair falls into his face, dotted with flecks of blood. Jeonghan thinks he has never looked more handsome, never looked more beautiful than when he refuses to grapple with the morality of ending a man’s life who doesn’t value the lives of others. 

Seokmin rips the badge off the man’s chest before he lays a bullet to rest in it. Jeonghan swells with pride.

\---

Their “operation” functions out of the cellar of a Chinese grocery.

Jeonghan always liked to try on different lives to see how they feel on his skin. Becoming the foremost speakeasy in the city, the largest supplier of alcohol, and the public enemy of the Chicago Police Department - it’s the crown jewels causing pain in his neck, but envy in the eyes of those who look.

Initially, it was only bootlegging. There’s a distillery in another location and they needed to diversify their network to avoid the police. Eventually the cellar of the grocery, where people gathered to purchase dark brown bottles of liquor, was filled with patrons wanting to enjoy their purchases on site.

Now the modest brickwork space contains a small, haphazardly built stage where a five-piece jazz band plays rollicking dance music. On any given open night there’s near a hundred guests crammed into the nooks and crannies, under the wooden stairs, circled around rickety tables. The makeshift bar at the far end has a few of their “employees” serving dreadfully overpriced liquor. Most of the “staff” are Chinese - former  _ tong _ boys who hate the police almost as much as Seokmin does - but there’s a mix of people from all over, and a hefty number of well-to-do white customers - who they charge double. 

Jeonghan sits at the makeshift bar with a snifter in between his fingers while Seokmin attempts to learn the Charleston dance from a drunk young woman in a dress cut just below the knee. Neither of them have quite gotten used to seeing so much skin; Jeonghan finds it entertaining, Seokmin finds it difficult to hold a conversation. Though now Seokmin is drunk enough liquor to touch her bare arm as he stumbles over his own feet and leans into her lips when she kisses his cheek to console him. 

He's watched Seokmin with so many women over the years, with so many men. The image of Seokmin finding comfort during the war – with strangers, with their friends – is burned into his mind. Jeonghan had made him swear that last night in Paris. Seokmin keeps his promises. He never breaks trust.

“What’s wrong,  _ hyung _ ?” Seokmin asks sincerely as he approaches, slipping into Korean and reflecting Jeonghan’s scowl on his own ruddy face. With a struggle, he reaches over the bar and snatches a bottle of whiskey from the other side, takes heavy pulls and hisses at the sting.

“You reek like alcohol,” Jeonghan says flatly. Seokmin grins with his lips around the bottle, crowds himself between Jeonghan’s legs and rests his sweaty hand too high on Jeonghan’s thigh to be proper for two men in public. He pours some of the whiskey in Jeonghan’s glass, holding his eyes, digging his thumb into the inseam of Jeonghan’s pants.

Seokmin laughs. “Is that why you look so mad? You could smell me from across the room? You do know we’re in a bar, right?”

Jeonghan would have so much of an easier time maintaining his side of the promise if Seokmin wasn’t so tactile. If Seokmin didn’t insist on casual touches with deceptive intentions. He has slept with Seokmin enough times to know when Seokmin wants him.

The band swings into something with heavy brass and the crowd  _ whoops _ in unison. They’re lucky enough for a moment of calm after six weeks of unrepentant unrest - between the raids and not one, but  _ two _ other outfits knocking out their distribution lines. Jeonghan hasn’t ever truly enjoyed calm. 

Calm was deceptive the way Seokmin’s smile has become deceptive. 

Jeonghan looks up and the girl Seokmin left on the floor is watching as he leans upwards, whispers against Seokmin’s ear, “Forget about me, your doting mentor. Your dance partner misses you. Run along.”

Seokmin goes perfectly still before remembering himself. Jeonghan is still hovering near Seokmin’s cheek and the apple of his cheekbone brushes his lips as Seokmin smiles. His laughter is soft and low, fingertips digging into the meat of Jeonghan’s thigh. “Why do you always look so disapproving about the people I bring around?”

It’s more difficult to maintain the promise when they’re both this drunk off stolen liquor – something that occurs far too often and tests their resolve far too much. Seokmin is more sensitive when he’s drunk and he’s less likely to pull away. Jeonghan is more intense when he’s drunk and more likely to toe the line.

“Boss,” says a gruff voice behind them. They separate, and one of their “employees” looks between them with suspicion. “Police were spotted five blocks away. Headed our direction.”

Seokmin is always loud enough to shout instructions over the band. 

There’s a passageway hidden by a shelf packed full of grocery stock - bags of flour, rice, cans that have gone untouched for nearly five years. It leads to a cellar across the road, in a building with a door that faces into a small empty lot where their customers scatter like a beehive disturbed. 

In the room itself there is an organized chaos. Bottles and tables and chairs are stashed under floorboards and the band stows instruments in cargo boxes labeled in Chinese. The room is magicked into a storage room once again, empty and drab and smelling faintly of smoke, but mostly of mildew.

Seokmin slides the shelf back into place before the door is locked and shut. He laughs as leans against the brickwork corridor, resting his head as his chest heaves with all the breath he lost tossing stools through a trapdoor under his feet. Jeonghan leans on the wall beside him and puts a finger to Seokmin’s lips.

The police speak on the other side of the door, and their voices are loud, but Seokmin’s breathing is louder.

There’s no light in the corridor aside from a lantern far off around one of the corners, but Jeonghan can make out the point of Seokmin’s sharp nose, the edge of his chin. They turn to aim in Jeonghan’s direction. He can’t see it, but he knows how Seokmin is looking at him. He can feel his eyes on him, along with the gravitational pull of Seokmin’s lips close enough to his that when Seokmin breathes it makes him shiver.

Jeonghan has denied Seokmin for seven years. Jeonghan doesn’t make a habit of denying himself something he wants unless it suits him. It didn’t suit him to let Seokmin have him after the decision he made to go to war. After all they’d built in Paris through their isolation and their happiness and lack of complexity.

Seokmin had destroyed their joy and Jeonghan would never forgive him for it. He would never forgive Seokmin for waking up with nightmares about the trenches or for dying out on a wet field with a bayonet through his chest while Jeonghan was forced to watch. He would never forgive Seokmin for making him suffer the pain of watching him in pain.

When Seokmin finally leans in to kiss him, he wonders what forgiveness truly is.

Maybe it is a crumbling wall? Maybe it is being dominated by a stronger will?

Maybe it is Seokmin’s wet mouth on his, stealing the air from his lungs. Maybe it is Seokmin’s shaking sigh as he touches Jeonghan as if he’d never forgotten how.

\---

Their house is made of blood-red brick, tucked into a nicer part of town just on the edge of where they’re reasonably allowed to live. It’s large, with several more rooms than they need. Initially, they were refused the title until Jeonghan threatened the previous owners, a protestant banker and his wife, into handing it over despite their nationality. 

Seokmin appreciates the stability of a home, the way he can display mementos and photographs and the slightly yellowed portrait Minghao painted of him in Nantes in the shared study. Jeonghan appreciates the crystal chandelier in the dining room, the polished wood, the velveteen furniture. 

It’s already a sticky morning, sun barely touching the sky, when he sees a shadow pass under his door. Jeonghan saw Seokmin leave before the close of the night with a man that wasn’t a regular patron - though he’d made a quick study; low class, playing at a lifestyle he couldn’t afford, wedding band on his left ring finger. 

Jeonghan turns in his bed, nudging at the body beside him until it stirs.

“Get out, please,” he commands. The man sleeping by his side blearily peeks up at him, but doesn’t argue. He’s handsome, bulky, Jeonghan vaguely remembers him claiming he was a sailor, maybe a soldier. It’s not as if it matters. He leaves silently after Jeonghan rejects his attempt at a kiss on the cheek.

He can hear Seokmin running a bath and decides to meet him with a cup of coffee once he’s out and drying off in his room. Jeonghan leans against Seokmin’s bedpost as casually as possible, silk dressing robe with nothing beneath it, two ceramic cups in each hand. Seokmin has a towel wrapped around his waist and shuffles through drawers, back turned, a map of sporadic freckles on his skin fully displayed.

“Did you have fun?” Jeonghan asks disinterestedly.

Seokmin gives him an earnest smile over his shoulder, noticing the proffered cup of coffee. He holds his towel up with one hand and accepts the mug with the other. “Did you?” he deflects with a wink.

Up close he can still smell the cheap perfume on Seokmin’s damp skin. “Was it with both of them?” he asks. “I mean...since he was married and all.”

He takes another long sip and grins. “I never ask you about yours.” A pause as he licks his lips. “Since when do you care about mine?”

It’s a song and dance in three acts. It involves players who never consented to be on the stage, and Jeonghan isn’t sure how the script was agreed upon in the first place.

The first act happened when they went their separate ways, when they watched the other encroaching on the space of a person they wanted. Jeonghan sitting under the staircase with his hand hidden by the lip of a table, touching a man in public, catching Seokmin staring from the corner of his eyes. Seokmin getting into a car at the end of the night while Jeonghan watches from the curb, making sure Jeonghan is looking when he kisses the man behind the steering wheel.

The second act is this moment. The rising action, the prelude. It’s Seokmin taking his time to find  _ just _ the right undershirt, setting a pair of boxer shorts on the bed without putting them on. The empty cups of coffee still warm from their contents left to cool on a side table. 

The third act is Jeonghan pushing Seokmin up against the damask wallpaper. It’s Seokmin gripping him by his wrists so he stops pulling so hard at his dripping wet hair and Seokmin undoing the knot on his robe, harsh and purposeful. Then, Jeonghan sinking to the floor in front of him and taking him half-hard in his mouth. 

Seokmin’s skin isn’t saccharine sweet anymore, there’s no fluttering pulse in his chest. When he pushes Jeonghan’s hair off his forehead, the smile he casts downward cuts sharp like a knife, and Jeonghan lets himself bleed into the Turkish rug under his knees.

“Did he…” Seokmin asks once they’re on the bed. Jeonghan crawls over him, Seokmin dips his fingers between Jeonghan’s legs. “I don’t like when they finish inside you,” Seokmin says against his ear.

“Oh, are there rules now?” 

“Would you follow them if there were?” Seokmin laughs hoarsely. 

“Are you jealous?” Jeonghan smirks as Seokmin works him open again. The feeling is like nothing else, like no one else. Seokmin plays him like an instrument he’s mastered.

“Are you?” Seokmin smiles.

He is. Of course, he is. But he knows that Seokmin is too when he pushes him backwards into the pillows, when he moves inside him like he’s trying to mark his territory. Jeonghan toys with him in a way that’s unfair. He pushes Seokmin like a domesticated animal, trying to reduce him to his natural instinct. Until Seokmin bares teeth.

For a moment Jeonghan feels like Seokmin’s jaws are around his throat, poised to bite down. He scrambles at the bedsheets as if he’s not already submitting, as if he doesn’t want Seokmin lips pressing brand-like onto his, as if he doesn't hold Seokmin’s gaze.

Seokmin catches his frenzied hands and laces their fingers together. He kisses Jeonghan’s knuckles and laughs against them and when he stares at Jeonghan while he comes, it’s enough to send Jeonghan over the edge with him.

Jeonghan leaves Seokmin flushed and panting in his bed. Neither of them spare a second glance at each other when Jeonghan leaves the room. But Seokmin hangs onto his wrist for a second too long, nails digging into the delicate bone bordering on painful. Jeonghan shakes out of his grasp and begins his day.

\---

There’s a tonality used amongst their “staff” like it’s a language of its own. 

This low cadence has Seokmin reaching for his pistol hidden under the bar and discreetly sliding it into his waistband at his lower back.

It’s early in the night, nobody there aside from their employees and the intruder currently trifling through one of their hidden storerooms. Seokmin assumes it’s the police, Jeonghan assumes more Italians. They’d caught the attention of the South Side Gang and hardly had the manpower to fight back.

Jeonghan and Seokmin are led to the storeroom in the furthest back corner of the space. Three weeks ago, it was smashed to pieces in the middle of the operating hours of the grocery on the surface. Two weeks ago, a small fire was set under the stairs. The attacks were getting exponentially bolder.

“Want me to go in?” their employee asks. He’s young, maybe only seventeen. He came from the orphanage that Seokmin had been funding for the last several years. 

Seokmin comforts him with a smile and a hand on the shoulder. “It’s alright,  _ péngyǒu _ . If there’s somebody breaking in back here, we can handle it.” 

The boy bows and takes his leave so Jeonghan and Seokmin can draw their weapons in peace. Jeonghan giggles as he checks the chamber of his gun. “ _ It's alright, péngyǒu _ ,” he mimics in Seokmin’s nasally tone. “So fatherly.”

Seokmin leans back in silent gleeful laughter, pulling Jeonghan into his chest with a loose half-hug, fingers splayed in his stomach. It’s a ritual, the spiraling, dizzying, ascension of a fight and the reassuring touch. Decades of confrontations matched with gentle exchanges.

This time Seokmin capitalizes on their position to land a kiss on the top of Jeonghan’s head, the briefest press of his nose into Jeonghan’s scalp. It sends a shock down to the base of Jeonghan’s spine where Seokmin already rests a clammy palm.

“Stay safe,  _ hyung _ .”

Seokmin goes first, as always. Jeonghan covers with a pistol aimed over his shoulder. There are rows of stock, bottles of black, blue, green, clear and pure. Canadian liquor that’s hard to move south and locally made hooch that smells like motor oil even when it’s corked.

A shape in a brown suit moves in the back, shifting through the bottles like a mother agonizing over which brand of milk to buy at the market. He’s got a puff of black hair kept parted down the center like it’s been for centuries, unmistakable silver hoop festooning the shell of his ear. Jeonghan smiles wide and pulls the trigger.

Soonyoung spins around with a hand clasping a quickly bleeding bullet wound in the back of his shoulder. “You shot me!” he yelps, voice breaking.

Seokmin tries to hide his smile as Jeonghan tucks his gun back under his jacket. “That’s what you get for breaking in you little rat.”

“I was bringing you a gift!” Soonyoung lifts one of the bottles in his hand. A cognac they’d received from Montreal. The bottle is gathering dust and was miraculously unharmed in the last raid from their rivals. Soonyoung, naturally, has found the most expensive bottle of liquor they have on the premises.

“It’s not a gift if it’s from our own storeroom,” Jeonghan says. He crosses his arms and there’s the tinkle of a bullet casing falling on the floor once Soonyoung’s body rejects it. Soonyoung assures himself that he’s no longer bleeding before he rushes into Jeonghan’s arms.

Jeonghan cackles indelicately as Soonyoung spins him around, kisses all over his face and very nearly drops him. He unsteadily takes hold of the shelf closest to him as the room spins and watches Seokmin and Soonyoung stick their tongues out and yell at each other in disgusting tradition before colliding in a hug.

“What are you doing here? I thought you were in Europe with Gyu- _ hyung _ ?” Seokmin asks excitedly. Soonyoung replies by pinching his cheek so hard Seokmin winces between delight and pain.

“I couldn’t let you two have all the fun,” Soonyoung pokes him in the stomach. “You start a gang war and don’t even invite me? I’m so hurt, Minnie.”

Jeonghan knows this pretense. Soonyoung’s distracting exuberance and appearing somewhere alone. And Soonyoung knows that Jeonghan knows based on the way his smile falters for the shortest moment once they make eye contact.

He hopes that Minghao and Junhui have found Mingyu. He hopes they remember how all the broken pieces go back together.

Seokmin claps Soonyoung on the neck and presses their heads together. “Missed you,  _ hyung _ .”

Soonyoung seems taken aback by the display of affection. Jeonghan can commiserate. 

“Missed you, too,” Soonyoung says, softly. Pressing a quick kiss to the pointed tip of Seokmin’s nose. Seokmin snorts out a laugh and Soonyoung matches it with equal measure. “Please get me drunk.”

\---

“I have never…” Soonyoung sighs. He holds one gloved hand up like he’s swearing an oath, the other rests on Jeonghan’s shin where it’s draped across his lap in the bench seat. “Hmmm…I have never been married.”

Their car is parked across the street from a police vehicle garage slightly outside the city. They’ve all become so used to January in Chicago that they hardly flinch when a gust of icy wind sneaks through the cracks in the car door.

Seokmin scoffs as he puts down the remaining finger on his right hand, letting it come to rest on Jeonghan’s head on his lap. Jeonghan giggles, takes a pull from his hipflask before passing it to Seokmin.

“Wait…when were you married,  _ hyung _ ?” Seokmin gapes.

Soonyoung laughs and smacks Jeonghan’s leg. “Oh, Hannie, you didn’t tell him about tha-“

Jeonghan kicks at Soonyoung’s hip in warning, leaning up to tip the flask into Seokmin’s mouth. Seokmin drinks with wide eyes cast downward and Jeonghan grins. They stare at one another, like two duelists in the field waiting for the other to shoot first. Seokmin relents with the shake of his head, like he always does.

“My turn?” Seokmin grits through the bitterness of the gin. “Ah…well…never have I been responsible for a  _ coup d’état _ .”

Soonyoung grumbles as he puts down another finger, yanking the flask out of Seokmin’s hand. “You were so much nicer when you were younger, you know that? Now you gang up on me with him.”

“I do not!”

“You  _ do _ . I make the teeny, tiniest joke and you bring up the  _ one _ time I started a  _ very _ small, and  _ very _ unsuccessful revolution in England.”

“You decided to stay with us,” Jeonghan says, stuttered by the way Seokmin’s laughter jostles his head. “Have you ever heard the saying: houseguests, like fish, begin to stink after three days?”

“Oh, but it’s been seven months,” Soonyoung beams, poking at Jeonghan’s stomach until he squirms. “And I know you like having me around, Hannie-baby.”

Jeonghan slaps his hand away. “No, I’m just nice. And Seokmin is always taking in strays, you know that.” He leans backwards enough to take in the underside of Seokmin’s chin, the flex of his jaw as he bickers with Soonyoung. Seokmin subconsciously soothes the leather clad pad of his thumb over Jeonghan’s right eyebrow. He looks down at him with a smile, pressing the button of his nose.

“Your turn,  _ hyung _ .”

Jeonghan hums, the wool of Seokmin’s coat scratching his scalp as he leans into the hard lines of his belly through his clothes. Seokmin cradles his cheek, takes a swig from the flask without hearing a question, and narrows his eyes over the steering wheel to the building down the street.

“Never have I been in love,” Jeonghan decides, pursing his lips at Soonyoung to show how he means to stir his finger in the open wound of Soonyoung’s routine separation from Mingyu. Instead, he finds Soonyoung looking at him curiously and Seokmin murmuring a curse as he throws the car into gear.

Seokmin trails a police vehicle through a maze work of city blocks to a small tenement house on the North Side. Soonyoung crawls into the backseat on the drive, distributing the violin cases where they hide their guns. Soonyoung thumbs bullets into a handgun, takes out Seokmin’s American soldier-issue knife, sets them both in Seokmin’s lap as he drives.

They stop in an alleyway beside the building where two police officers are unloading confiscated barrels of whiskey into the basement of the tenement house. Seokmin presses a kiss to Jeonghan’s temple before he slips out of the car. He acts as their reconnaissance and is crouched above one of the basement windows with his gun drawn as Soonyoung and Jeonghan finish gearing up.

Soonyoung slides a pair of brass knuckles on to his right hand. The metal catches on the orange street lamps like his sharp smile. “Once a liar, always a liar, Jeonghan, but come on…Never been in love?”

Jeonghan checks his scope by aiming directly at Soonyoung’s head. If he’d chambered any rounds and pulled the trigger, Soonyoung would be regrowing the plates of his skull for twenty minutes.

“I have never once lied in my life. You know honesty has always been my strong suit.”

“Oh, Jeonghan…” Soonyoung says with a pitying smile. “You have to know I can see the way you look at him.”

“You’re being awfully bold for somebody who has a very powerful gun pointed at his forehead.”

Soonyoung puts his hands up but he laughs. “Didn’t know it was such a sore subject. Also...I know there’s no bullets in there.”

Jeonghan relents only because he sees Seokmin’s confused look out of the corner of his eye. He lowers his rifle, forces himself to stop gripping the trigger loop so hard that his knuckle pops out of place. Soonyoung looks down where he flexes and un-flexes his hand, an aggravating demonstration of his observational skills. 

Somehow Soonyoung’s smirk being replaced with genuine concern is more disquieting. 

They decide to set a fire to the tenement house. It’s simple enough. Soonyoung could make a fire out of a tube of lipstick and a shoe if he really set his mind to it.

They peel out of the alleyway once the splinter thin siding catches flame, smoke billows inside the car and Seokmin’s laughter is the only thing revealing his location from how close he is to Jeonghan while Jeonghan tries to get control of the car.

Men shouting curses in heavy Irish accents fire on them, scattering out of the building like ants from a crushed hill. Soonyoung leans out of the rear window, firing back with bullets and expletives in Italian just to stir the pot. Seokmin has to lean over and yank him back in the car by his leg while Jeonghan takes a corner on two wheels.

As they drive through the city streets the smoke dissipates and Seokmin is so close as Jeonghan holds two hands on the steering wheel. Soonyoung recalls the event as if Seokmin and Jeonghan hadn’t been there, speaking far too loudly and laughing like a lunatic, filling the silence with his raucousness.

Seokmin smells like ash when he catches Jeonghan in a kiss. Jeonghan yelps against his lips, swerving on the street, and Seokmin pulls away with a boyish grin. He mutters an apology, but he doesn’t sound particularly apologetic.

Jeonghan doesn’t care if Soonyoung says anything to him about it later. He pulls over, pulls up the hand brake, and kisses Seokmin until his mouth doesn’t taste like smoke.

\---

Tonight, there’s no fight to be had. 

Between the police, the South Side Gang, and North Side Gang, it’s a well-earned break. Jeonghan has always loved demonstrating his superiority, but he feels more on edge these days than he did during the war.

Up on the makeshift stage Seokmin and Soonyoung are visions in pinstripe. They are hands meeting on hips, and eyes meeting matching smiles, pronouncing the lyrics to “It Had To Be You" in perfect, trained English. Seokmin glows under the balminess of Soonyoung’s mischievous, toothy grin. He’s drunk enough whiskey not to cover up his affection and Jeonghan digs his nails into his palm. 

Soonyoung’s hand behind Seokmin’s back moves covertly until Seokmin hits a high note far too high and then descends into laughter. He’s got such an influence on people, such a draw, that half the bar laughs with him. There’s fond eyes behind him from the band, a shake of their heads. Even they’re used to the antics now.

Jeonghan wants him more when he’s in this state. When the world turns its gaze on Lee Seokmin with open and adoring eyes, and he turns back, warmed by it like a flower tracking the sun. Seokmin is loved so thoroughly by everyone. By their employees, by the communities he provides money and time to, by Soonyoung and Minghao and Junhui and Mingyu, by anyone who meets him. Seokmin gives their love back in armfuls, regardless of how worthy they are of it.

And Jeonghan is selfish and loves nothing more than to take something that doesn’t belong to him.

Seokmin leaves with a man before they close. Jeonghan leaves after he watches Seokmin go. Soonyoung follows Jeonghan home like a stray cat they’ve fed too many times.

Soonyoung kisses Jeonghan while they’re both drunk on the couch in the sitting room. The radio plays jazz at a low volume, and there are forgotten glasses of liquor on the side table. It’s familiar, to kiss Soonyoung, to have Soonyoung half-dressed on top of him. They’ve always been so good at distracting each other when they’ve needed it.

Seokmin is probably naked in that man’s bed. There are three new letters from Mingyu addressed to Soonyoung on the desk in the study.

“Are we going to talk about the elephant in the room,” Soonyoung says against Jeonghan’s mouth. “Because I can multitask.”

“I don’t think you’re in a position to speak to me about it.” Jeonghan catches Soonyoung’s hair between the webs of his fingers, bucks his hips up against Soonyoung’s. “In more ways than one.”

Soonyoung laughs, low and thick. He leans away. His arms bracket Jeonghan, pinning him against the couch. “I think I’m probably the best person to talk about it with actually.”

Jeonghan tenses and pushes at Soonyoung. He tries to maintain the air of disinterest, but the feeling of a hot coil clamps around his spine. He knows his eyes are betraying him, because Soonyoung’s narrow. 

“I don’t run from my problems like you do,” Jeonghan jabs.

“No, you just fuck them and tell them to go sleep in another room and pretend you aren’t in love with them.”

“Don’t.” One word and it’s nearly impossible to get out behind gritted teeth. 

“I’m trying to be helpful. I know you only want to fool around with me when he’s not here. I can tell you wish I were him. I don’t understand what’s stopping you from being honest with him.”

Jeonghan is particularly skillful at disarming an opponent. Minghao painstakingly instructed him in a multitude of ways hundreds of years ago, back when Jeonghan was so frail he couldn’t stop a dagger with both hands even if it came down in the hands of a child. Now, he knows the right way to hit somebody’s wrist, how to grab hold and twist until they scream.

“What’s the problem with you and Mingyu, then? Let’s hear it.” 

Soonyoung’s smile falters and then picks back up. He shakes his head, stands from the sofa with his hands in his pockets. “I am perfectly capable of telling Mingyu I love him. Even with everything… Mingyu does know that I love him.”

There’s a silence, the sound of crackling embers from the fireplace. Jeonghan sucks his teeth and trains his face. Soonyoung doesn’t relent, holds his eyes, and then submits with a sorrowful sigh.

“Hannie, he loves you so much. Can’t you see that? I know you have to. He’s not very good at hiding it.”

“You know, after two centuries you’d think you would have learned when to be quiet.”

“You’re not being fair to him.”

Soonyoung looks more angry than he does hurt and Jeonghan feels the same boiling anger he does when he finally gets a knife into somebody who just won’t stop fighting him off. His hands tremor with it, and Soonyoung watches that anger simmer before he stalks off up the stairs.

Jeonghan lies on the couch. Too irritated to even be on the same floor as Soonyoung. But he can’t force himself to fall asleep.

There are truths that Jeonghan refuses to acknowledge out of self-preservation. The same way he’d refuse to acknowledge his hunger as a child when he knew there was nothing to eat. The same way he’d refuse to acknowledge how outmatched he was in a fight before he was trained with a weapon.

It’s impossible not to feel how Seokmin loves him.

He doesn’t remember falling asleep on the sofa, but he remembers waking. The front door clicks shut and there’s the  _ tap tap  _ sound of shoes being taken off at the door. The clock on the mantle reads 3:15 and there’s the unmistakable drift of late-spring rain between the crack of the heavy velvet curtains.

When he sits up from the couch, Seokmin is standing in the entryway to the sitting room with abject anxiety between pink cheeks and mussed hair. He frowns even further as he enters the room and Jeonghan isn’t sure what he’s given away to make Seokmin think something is wrong.

“ _ Hyung _ ?” he asks. He pulls a blanket off a chair, before putting it over Jeonghan’s shoulders and sitting beside him. “Are you okay?”

He smells like sex and aftershave, and up close he can see the post-haze glassiness to his soft eyes. It’s something he’s familiar with. How Seokmin falls into a lazy bliss when he’s sated, how he can’t help his half-smile and dim eyes.

“Fine.” Jeonghan wraps himself in the blanket, offering an edge for Seokmin to join him underneath. Seokmin takes it with a quirk of his lips and pulls Jeonghan into him so he can rest his chin on the top of Jeonghan’s head.

“You don’t have to talk if you don’t want to,” he says, and Jeonghan’s heart feels sickly with the way it falters in his chest. 

This is hardest to ignore. The sex is the easiest. Seokmin can come home and fuck him and he’ll think a hundred thousand less thoughts than when Seokmin comes home and wants to hold him, when he knows something has Jeonghan upset just by looking at him.

Seokmin’s hand pushes warmth in circles on Jeonghan’s back, but his chin on the crown of Jeonghan’s head gets heavier and heavier as Seokmin slips into unconsciousness sitting up.

The radio is static now, broadcast having ended, and the sound is like San Francisco Bay rain. There’s light from the fireplace catching on the blade of the mounted white jade sword, a soft snow that won’t stick like a Paris winter. Seokmin’s breath evens and his head lulls into the cushions away from Jeonghan’s head.

He can watch him this way. Disregard to his own self-preservation.

Jeonghan lies half on his stomach with his chin on Seokmin’s upper arm. He slides a featherlight fingertip down Seokmin’s nose, over his Cupid’s bow, through his mussed bangs on his forehead. Careful, cautious, not wanting to wake him. Because, Seokmin slack from sleep is beautiful; no hardened brow from a war he didn’t need to fight, no worrisome eyes when he’s afraid he’s said the wrong thing, no pursed lips as he blooms under the adoration from strangers. 

Here he can try on another life. One where Seokmin loves him and Jeonghan allows him to. Like the weight of a heavy fur coat, smothering and warm.

The most beautiful man he’s ever seen, perfect face and perfect body. The biggest heart he’s ever found in person, beating steadily where their chests are pressed together. The person who knows his best in the world. The man who knows how to make him laugh and how to make him happy. Who knows what he fears without ever discussing it openly, because he knows how much Jeonghan would hate it if he did.

“Come to bed,” Jeonghan murmurs, as if they’ve been having a conversation all along. Seokmin stirs and smiles without opening his eyes. 

“I haven’t had a bath yet,” he whispers, voice hoarse with sleep. “You hate it when I smell like other people.”

He replies with a kiss. On the corner of Seokmin’s chin, where his dimple hides until he smiles. “Don’t care.”

“I’m tired, Jeonghannie,” Seokmin half pouts, and Jeonghan kisses it off his lips.

“I’ll do all the work.” Another kiss. Another turn in a life that isn’t his. “I want you.”

Seokmin’s eyes are wide open when Jeonghan pulls away and he’s looking between Jeonghan’s like he’s trying to understand. Jeonghan makes a concentrated effort to give him nothing beyond what he’s willing to. He leans in again, and this time Seokmin cradles his head so gently it makes him ache.

Jeonghan climbs to straddle Seokmin’s lap, kisses him as he tries desperately to stay on the right side of consciousness. It makes him slow, pliable, near silent aside from weighted breaths as Jeonghan rides him languidly.

“Say it again,” Seokmin whispers against his cheek. Jeonghan knows what he means without having to ask. Brutal honesty born out of over-tiredness, born out of the way Jeonghan keeps him on the edge.

“I want you.”

Jeonghan does not run from problems. He ignores them. 

\---

The first week of February begins with a knife at Jeonghan’s throat. 

Out in the back garden, Soonyoung and Seokmin are practicing swordsmanship, the hilt of  _ Molan _ hanging petal-like and loose in Seokmin’s palm like its namesake. The white of the jade and the white of melting snow in the yard and the white of Seokmin’s rolled sleeves. Jeonghan stands at the window, fanning himself over a cup of tea, sifting through correspondence from his suppliers up North while the radio scratches out a slow piano tune. 

He finds himself distracted by Seokmin’s footwork, old boots in the grass, sweat glistening at his temples despite the cold. He’ll never be fluid in his movements, or natural when he pulls the sword up by the backhand to block Soonyoung’s strike, or lovely when he parries with a wide arched swing. But he’s beautiful in the bright sunlight of an early morning, looking perfectly a man out of time holding a sword while wearing modern trousers and a proud smile on his face when he knocks Soonyoung to the ground. 

Jeonghan reaches for his tea while Seokmin reaches for Soonyoung. He watches him over the edge of the teacup, sweat dripping down the column of his throat as he and Soonyoung giggle like teenagers. 

He doesn’t hear the footsteps until they’re just behind him, just as he’s setting the cup back onto the tabletop. A heavy body pushes up against his back and a small blade is pressed high up against his throat so he’s forced onto his tip toes. There’s the low sound of a voice whispering in his ear and a hand covering his mouth, sweat and salt and gun oil pushed past his lips with a taste so disgusting that he gags in the back of his throat. 

“Don’t fucking move,” says the voice, Irish accented. Two other men flank and he can see them out of the corner of his eyes on either side. They’re significantly larger than he is, burly and red cheeked from a car ride no doubt - he can smell the gasoline even through the fingers blocking his nostrils. 

He’s calm above, but below anger boils his bones until they're liquified. The other two men restrain his wrists, pull roughly at his shoulders until the right one pops sickeningly and pain shoots up the side of his neck. They whisper,  _ there’s the other two outside _ .

“Little birdy came down from his nest,” the first man says, wet in his ear. Jeonghan tests their grip, finds himself restrained entirely by their combined strength. They begin walking him backwards out of the room and Jeonghan complies, formulating a strategy - redistribute his weight just so, maybe a leg on the chaise, or hooked on the archway of the door. The knife scrapes into his jaw and he hisses at the blood being drawn.

They’re barely halfway into the sitting room when Seokmin comes barging through, sword first, straight into the man at his left’s throat. There’s a collective yelp, a wet gurgle as the man aspirates on his blood and Seokmin pulls  _ Molan  _ back with a muddy boot jammed into the man’s stomach.

He slashes through the man’s chest, a clean line from right shoulder to left hip that splatters blood all over the climbing honeysuckle print rug - cream and deep forest green and sunset orange now wet with scarlet red. His jaw sets, flexes as he watches the man crumple to the floor. There’s blood up to his wrists now, blood on the ice white hilt of  _ Molan _ . Jeonghan tries to twist himself free, but the knife at this throat presses in far enough to slice at his skin. 

When Seokmin looks at him, he can finally see the look in his eyes. Dark like a sea in a storm, roiling and untamed and utterly frightening. It makes Jeonghan freeze against the man’s chest.

Seokmin hacks into the arm of the man at Jeonghan’s right, who is foolish enough to raise a gun in Seokmin’s direction. The spasm caused by steel meeting bone sends the shot askew and straight into the wooden paneling of the sitting room, hitting something on the other side that shatters like glass.

Seokmin doesn’t react to Soonyoung entering the room or to the sound of his name being called.

Jeonghan won’t ever know what the man behind him looked like before he died. But if Seokmin’s sharp features like jagged glass, staring at him with utter hatred is any indication, he must have died terrified. Seokmin crushes his wrist where he holds his knife, jerks outward and shoves the end of  _ Molan  _ into his side, spearing through his liver. Seokmin juts out his chin at the force it takes, nose curling up in such uncharacteristic animosity that Jeonghan can feel the intensity of his own pulse skip in the wound in his throat.

As soon as Jeonghan is free, he grabs hold of where he’s bleeding and stumbles back, eyes wide on Seokmin as he tugs  _ Molan  _ free from the body of the man he shows the most fury towards. It’s one more clean slice across the neck as the man slides to his knees at Seokmin’s feet. A perfect irony as he tears open the skin with the blade  _ just _ where Jeonghan’s wound is closing on his own throat. 

Jeonghan has slouched back against a table in the room, knocking over picture frames by the dozen. A portrait of Minghao and Junhui smashes to the floor. He has one hand holding his own weight as the adrenaline subsides. Soonyoung is in the corner, his own sword in hand with eyes wider than he’s ever seen, looking between Seokmin’s back and Jeonghan’s shocked gaze. He opens his mouth to speak before thinking better of it and snapping it shut. 

Seokmin’s chest is heaving dangerously fast and he’s still looking down at the three bodies fencing him in at his feet. There’s still the tension of alarm in his shoulders, wildness in his features that Jeonghan has never seen.

And suddenly Jeonghan’s back in a bank vault in San Jose. His body lifeless in Seokmin’s arms, blinking awake to chaotic silence in the iron walled room. 

Seokmin looks up at him as if he’s just noticed he’s there. For a moment he’s panting, searching Jeonghan’s face for confirmation of his presence, and then his face crumbles into tears. He drops  _ Molan  _ with a clatter, and there’s so much blood on his shirt that will be impossible to get out. Jeonghan swallows until his throat clicks and he drops his hand away from freshly grown skin to accept Seokmin’s body into the circle of his arms. 

He smells like copper and sweat and his cologne, but Jeonghan wants to be choked by the smell until he dies and comes back to life again, still swallowed in Seokmin’s broad chest. One hand holding Jeonghan’s head into the crook of his neck, one arm circles around his lower back to lift him nearly off the floor. He lets out an earthquake of a breath, exhaling against Jeonghan’s ear. Jeonghan grips at his shirt where it’s stuck with sweat at his back, pulls their bodies closer and lets his eyes fall shut. 

His heart slows to match Seokmin and a crushing realization hits him before he can fight it off. He has never felt safety the way he feels here. Here with Seokmin holding him suspended and bone-crushingly tight against his body like he’s trying to meld them together. Here where Seokmin will cut through men without blinking.

Seokmin sighs against his ear. 

“ _ Jeonghan _ .”

They call their staff for the bodies to be disposed of in the evening, so nobody will question the presence of a 250-pound rug being carried out into a milk truck. One of the men is recognized. A police officer’s son and Soonyoung leads the employees to an adequate place to dump the corpses before suspicions arise.

The house is mixed with sound for the first time in hours when the men arrive and the moment they leave it plunges into silence again. 

Seokmin forgets that distance is something that even exists. He clings to Jeonghan, keeps him in his eyeline, he even sits in the jamb of the door when Jeonghan bathes in the claw-footed tub. There’s very few times that Seokmin is utterly silent in his life - or perhaps within the last few decades of it. He is silent when he leans his cheek against the porcelain edge of the tub and lets Jeonghan scrub the dry blood from his fingernails where he missed it on the first pass. Seokmin takes the opportunity to kiss Jeonghan’s pulse under the skin of his wrist.

Jeonghan leads him to his bed without supper, because Seokmin’s body looks as if it’s threatening to collapse on itself any time he stands. He helps Seokmin undress down to his underwear, tugs the covers up and over them like a fortress wall.

Seokmin just stares at him from the other side of the mattress, eyes boring into Jeonghan so intently that he feels like a hole is being burned straight through him. Seokmin is so awfully tender when he finally touches him. Just the slightest flick of his finger to push his bangs up off of his forehead, a butterfly wing path down the roundness of his cheek.

“You know I can’t die,” Jeonghan offers, trying to ease the line between Seokmin’s eyebrows that’s been creased there for the last 12 hours.

“It’s not that,” Seokmin sighs. He pulls up one side of his cheek with a half-smile. Jeonghan shoves into him so their foreheads can press together.

“Then what is it?”

Snow has started to fall again outside, the whispering sound of it against the windows.

“I could feel it…” Seokmin starts. He takes a steadying breath, closes his eyes in reverie. “When you...I don’t know. I could feel this pain.”

“Seokmin,” Jeonghan says softly, urgingly. “Please try and explain.”

Seokmin wrestles with his thoughts for a moment and he wipes a tear from his cheek. “It was the worst pain I’ve ever felt. Right in the bottom of my stomach. I couldn’t…breathe o-or..think clearly. The only thing in my head was that I knew you were in danger and I…”

Jeonghan feels the world narrow to the five foot by six foot dimensions of his mattress. To Seokmin’s worried brow and his eyes brimming with tears. When he takes Seokmin’s hand he realizes how his own is shaking. “It’s alright. It’s…”

“Like Minghao,” Seokmin offers. “Like Minghao and Junhui?”

Jeonghan’s stomach churns uncomfortably and Seokmin is examining his face again. His eyelids drop lower, fingers catching on the rounded tip of his nose, over the blunt of his eyebrow. Seokmin leans towards him and drinks a kiss from his parted lips, sighs into his mouth hot and straight from his belly. Jeonghan lets himself be turned to his back, lets Seokmin have his way for once because he’s been stunned into assent by the gentle way Seokmin regards his body.

They move slowly with each other like the rock of ocean waves once a boat reaches the open sea. Seokmin holds himself up with one hand on the bed and his other curls around the back of Jeonghan’s neck to hold their faces near each other. There’s something in Seokmin’s eye as if he might cry again and Jeonghan feels it too. Overwhelming. As though his chest may explode with the way it burns and expands.

Seokmin kisses him open mouthed, drags his lips over his cheek, presses his mouth against his temple. He drops his head to Jeonghan’s ear, pants against it as he moves inside him. Jeonghan drags him closer by latching fingernails to skin, digging into flesh at his lower back to bring him impossibly closer.

There’s indiscernible mumbling, the lazy pronunciation of Jeonghan’s name, and then the undeniable catch of the tongue when Seokmin’s gasps, “ _ Nae sarang _ .”

_ My love _ .

Jeonghan freezes, spine like a ram rod and he pushes at Seokmin’s shoulder weakly. 

“No. Don’t...Don’t call me that.”

Moments like this encapsulated like a photograph. Black and white and unmoving. 

Jeonghan holds Seokmin’s chest against his and curls his toes as Seokmin drives deeper. The way they’re too near to look at one another without going cross eyed and the way Seokmin sounds when he’s close. The way Seokmin pants  _ my love my love my love  _ against his lips as he falls apart between Jeonghan’s thighs and the way Jeonghan comes just from hearing it.

The heap of them is sticky with sweat regardless of the cold. Where the suffocating weight of Seokmin’s body and reality commingle on top of Jeonghan until he’s gasping for air. Seokmin kisses him so he can’t catch his breath, suffocating him, stifling him.

“Don’t ever call me that, Seokmin,” Jeonghan says. He attempts to sound as cold as possible, but it comes out unpracticed and Seokmin sits up with confusion on his face.

“ _ Nae sarang _ ?” 

Jeonghan flinches and Seokmin pulls his body away like he’s suddenly ashamed of himself. 

“That’s not what this is.”

Seokmin’s eyes welling up with tears, a perfect snapshot when one falls and when he wipes his eye with the back of his hand like he’s capable of hiding it. He blinks and looks away, eyelashes in clusters.

“Then what is it, if not that?”

Jeonghan can’t answer that. He’s not sure how.

Seokmin breaks the quiet with a soft apology. As if it’s the only volume he’s capable of reaching with his throat tightening to stop himself from crying openly.

The mattress dips under Seokmin’s weight and Jeonghan’s back is turned to Seokmin in defiance when he leaves the room without another word.

Jeonghan focuses on the pattern of the damask wallpaper and the ticking of the grandfather clock in the entry hall. The drift of snow outside and the passing of lights in the window as Soonyoung returns home with the car.

The familiar sound of Seokmin’s bedroom door in a house that can no longer be home, creaking when he shuts it. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [my twitter](https://twitter.com/lithomancy) / [my curiouscat](https://curiouscat.qa/lithomancy)
> 
> [kim's twitter](https://twitter.com/dygonilly)


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I am so happy to be posting the final part of this. It was such a journey and I am so happy that so many of you enjoyed it. I hope you enjoy this part, too.
> 
> There are no words to describe how grateful I am to [Kim](https://archiveofourown.org/users/dygonilly/pseuds/dygonilly) for helping me through this chapter and this story. You know how I feel about it, but everyone should know how special it was to take this on together. This story means a lot to us both and it was a labor of love.
> 
> And as always thank you to [Ria](https://archiveofourown.org/users/skateboardachoo/pseuds/skateboardachoo) for beta'ing this entire story. Which took lots of work and patience on her end.
> 
> [playlist](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/2cQE4Da0MG0EiqAUcIHXLL?si=DNqsJSw0QE-FtdJlFx_4_g)

____________________________________________________________________________

_ Taegu _

_ 1751 _

____________________________________________________________________________

Jeonghan packs before dawn, and he takes Mingyu’s horse for good measure.

Sixteen days of uninterrupted rain is uncommon. It makes the bemired path from the main house to the stables nearly impossible to walk on with only the moon to light his way. Jeonghan stumbles over himself, his feet getting sucked into the mud, cursing that even the earth is begging him to stay.

One his final trip up the pathway to get the last of his things, he finds Minghao standing in the parted doorway. He holds a lantern out into the darkness, face settling once he can make out Jeonghan’s face in the candlelight.

“What are you doing awake so early?” he says blearily. “Come back to bed.”

Jeonghan stops when their toes meet. He hates being so dirty, but he lets the mud on his shoes edge up against the bottom hem of Minghao’s half-tied robes. 

“I am leaving,” he says tonelessly.

Minghao frowns, the last touches of sleep preventing him from being as reserved as he’d typically be in this situation. It’s a familiar one. “Why?”

Jeonghan scowls. “Forgive me if I cannot stomach two sets of bound souls. One had been quite enough.”

“Jeonghan,” Minghao says, softening. He lowers the lantern with his arm coming to hang limply at his side, the other reaching out until his hand cups the roundness of Jeonghan’s cheek. “I know it is unfair…”

“Do you?”

Minghao appears hurt by the question. “I have spent time dwelling on our circumstances for hundreds of years. But nothing more than why we were born in pairs and you were born alone.”

If there’s one thing Jeonghan cannot endure more than his own ostracization, it is Minghao’s affinity for pontificating. As if Jeonghan is still a child, as if he hasn’t outlived everyone he has ever known three times over. He looks away from Minghao’s face, resolving to stay steeped in his anger. 

Anger comes from hurt, built like the iron suits of armor worn far west in centuries past. It has a heaviness to it that makes Jeonghan weary to carry but satisfied not to be touched by anything else.

“You have never changed my mind before,” he says, pushing at Minghao’s hand. The touch only makes him angrier for the softness it carries. “It is foolish to expect different results.”

“Where will you go?” Minghao asks. He straightens, understanding that Jeonghan is correct, understanding that it is pointless to argue. It is not the first time Jeonghan has untethered himself and drifted away. It will not be the last.

Jeonghan rides away from the grand house in Taegu without a destination. Only that he must forget, for as long as he possibly can, that he was always meant to travel alone.

____________________________________________________________________________

_ Hong Kong _

_ 1931-1933 _

_ ____________________________________________________________________________ _

The Queen’s Road is like a clogged vein. People squeeze down sidewalks and under scaffolding, rickshaws meander through cars like blood clots. The street is a cacophony and Jeonghan slides around the crowds as best he can, violin case in hand. 

When he was eleven years old, he found his strength in slinking through a crowd. Stream like and precise, so he could be best unnoticed and carefully extract strings of coins where they dangled from richer hips. The streets were never this busy in Hanseong - or whatever they were calling it these days. He knocks into the shoulder of a British businessman who gives him a warning glare with bespectacled eyes. Jeonghan might have dogeared his life for a later date, once upon a time. He’s lost his touch.

Their home is expansive yet nestled in a row with dozens of others just the same, near the curve of Glenealy Street where it snakes up the mountain. The true jut of the range still far off, their steep little hill only a precursor. The home itself is white stone and starkly western in its construction. Jeonghan appreciates it for its parquet floored parlor and the way Seokmin and him will be separated by a story of the house rather than a walk down a hallway. 

The last of the furniture, after weeks of sleeping in a hotel, is still being carried up the front steps when he arrives, overheated and completely turned around from the last time he’d been in the city - long before the arrival of British troops in the harbor. What remains constant is that it’s still unspeakably hot in the fall. Which is the truth of any city: the weather never changes no matter which country it belongs to.

Seokmin is in his bedroom on the second story, the span of it almost the entire floor. It’s made up of a dark stained cherrywood four post bed, drifting mesh curtains to keep insects at bay, a gilded round mirror that catches the afternoon sunlight and reflects it back through the room. In the corner there is a desk, his own radio. He’d traveled with only a few chests, which now remain half unpacked with their contents flooding any free space in the room. Fine tailored suits and photographs, but  _ Molan _ reverently placed on his bed. 

“Oh good,” Seokmin looks up as Jeonghan enters. “You’re back. I’m having trouble communicating.” 

“Some of them speak English, you know. And you’ll pick up Cantonese as you go,” Jeonghan jokes. He starts sifting through the contents of the trunks without permission, pulling out wooden boxes stuffed to the brim with jewelry they had - mostly Jeonghan - gifted him over the years. The fine leather straps of the Parisian wristwatch have gone flimsy with overuse. 

“ _ Hyung _ ,” Seokmin whines back, standing with a pile of unfolded shirts at his side. “It took me almost a decade and a half to learn Mandarin alone…” 

Their laughter used to be easier. Jeonghan would nestle his head into Seokmin’s shoulder if he were as close as he is now, and Seokmin would wrap an arm around him. Now they remain at a considerate difference, two steps apart, and when Jeonghan leans into his laughter, Seokmin tips back. 

“I’ll teach you Cantonese, don’t worry your pretty little head about it,” Jeonghan giggles. “I’ve taught you every other language you know, haven’t I?”

There’s a box near the bottom of the trunk that’s wide and flat and the size of a dinner tray. He sets himself on the chair at the oakwood desk and places the box on his thighs. Seokmin pinches at his own bottom lip - his nervous habit - and he looks out towards the street from the arched windows of his bedroom. 

Inside there is a pistol. A Smith & Wesson with a chipped wooden grip and a nicked barrel. A relic of its time. The cylinders are empty and there’s no ammunition, but somehow, they’re filled with kerchiefs around faces, with wet dirt of an artichoke field, with coal dust boxcars snaking through golden valleys.

“You kept this?” Jeonghan asks. 

Seokmin nods, gently lifting the box away as if he’s asking permission. Their hands brush for the first time in two years. A jolting shock of stretched knuckles on palm lines. Jeonghan looks up and Seokmin looks away, mutters an apology, and closes the box so he can slide it under his bed. Hidden and buried and lost to time. 

\---

It’s nearing Spring and the gardens across from narrow road waft blossom scented breezes through the slatted windows of Jeonghan’s bedroom. The morning is warm already, bone heavy humidity dampening his mattress and hot air swirls through the room. He blinks awake to the crowns of trees outside of his window and the sound of the new piano in the parlor being played choppily and unskilled. He can’t make it out if it’s Schubert or Chopin. He’s never had an ear for the piano despite Junhui’s best effort. 

There’s stale tea in the kitchen and packages of sponge cakes on the table. The clock on the wall keeps time, and the church bells in the Campanile ring a half dozen times. Jeonghan makes his tea and ignores the voices in the other room, the laughter and whispered English. His shoulders are tense enough that he can hardly unclench his hand around the handle of the kettle when he sets it back down on the burner.

As he passes by the dining room, Seokmin is there with a man he’s seen twice before. Seokmin hasn’t made the effort to introduce him, but Jeonghan is hardly home enough to give him the opportunity. Still, Jeonghan knows he’s well-bred, upper-class, lives close by. He’s tall like Mingyu, but substantially bulkier in a way that makes Seokmin appear waifish at his side. There’s a gold watch on his wrist and he’s not dressed past his trousers and he has the longest, loveliest eyelashes Jeonghan has ever seen on a man. They flutter when Seokmin kisses the fold of his eyelid and then speaks low and scorching in his ear.

Jeonghan notes the heart shape of Seokmin’s easy smile, his hands clapping with laughter, and then he leaves for a day of work.

The work pays terribly, but it’s not as if he needs the money. His associate from the Wo Shing Wo is a man in his late forties who passes in and out of town with the tide. He doesn’t know his name - only calls him uncle once the man starts referring to him as his nephew in mixed company. There are times when he finds him in the smoky gambling hall just south of the docks. There are times when he’s told he’s not welcome. However, today he’s brought directly to the table where he’s playing a card game Jeonghan doesn’t know the rules of.

“Coming by empty handed I see,” the man says, looking for the trombone case Jeonghan is presumably supposed to have been carrying. 

“I wasn’t aware you meant for me to play,  _ káuhfú _ ,” he says with a courteous bow. The man motions to the seat beside him and Jeonghan takes it with a dip of his head in thanks. 

“ _ Ngoihsàng _ , there’s an errand I must have you run this evening.” The man doesn’t look up at Jeonghan as he speaks. He plays a hand, gathers his pearlescent pink chips in apparent victory. The other men at the table are politely ignoring the conversation if they have any suspicions of its hidden meaning.

“Of course.”

The man hands him a slip of paper with an address. “He is a friend of mine who borrowed a book. I would go to retrieve it, but you know of my bad knee.” 

Jeonghan smiles, careful not to show his teeth. “I would be happy to.”

\---

Seokmin’s soft sighs echo off the marble staircase of their home. Jeonghan passes by his door on his way out and it’s clear Seokmin doesn’t know he’s there.

He hasn’t been home in nearly a month. Anytime work comes up on the mainland, he takes it without question. He’ll leave Seokmin a note, pack his things, travel far, and return for only enough time to have a perfunctory exchange with Seokmin and pack his things again.

Especially now, since that man he’d seen in the dining room becomes as permanent in their home as the parquet floor in the parlor. Jeonghan still hasn’t bothered to learn His name, but he knows how He sounds when He comes.

Light streams through the crack where it’s left ajar, presuming that no one will disturb them. Jeonghan can make such little sound when he has the mind to.

They’re on the bed, Seokmin splayed on  _ His _ lap, back flexing as he holds tight to the headboard as the posts of the bed knock against the wall. And He wraps his arms around Seokmin’s waist, dwarfing him impossibly, and they both laugh, out of breath. 

Jeonghan can feel something cruel spur in his belly. 

“Hush,” says the man, his accent caught between his native tongue and the English he speaks for Seokmin’s benefit. “You’re so loud. Am I hurting you, darling?”

Seokmin shakes his head and then tips to the side with permission, and He latches on, claiming it with uneven teeth. Jeonghan’s finger twitches on the wall and Seokmin groans as he draws his body downwards. The freckles on his back never change, but there are angry tracks of fingernails passing through them now. 

Jeonghan makes certain to slam the front door on his way out of it.

Rain comes down in sheets. The visibility is nearly impossible from the rooftop across from the Victoria Hotel. There’s a contingent of men inside where money is exchanged when Jeonghan takes his shot. It misses. 

And perhaps it’s on purpose. 

When Jeonghan was fifteen he let himself lose in a fight. A man twice his weight caught him with his fingers dipped into pockets that didn’t belong to him. Jeonghan fought back desperately. He was too frail and underfed to hold him back and it was better to let him beat him into unconsciousness and escape custody later than to fight back and break his arm in the process.

One of the men from the hotel room he fired into slams Jeonghan onto his back. The sky pours itself out, he falls into a puddle elbows first, and the water soaks through his trousers. The man is larger than Jeonghan and armed with a knife that he spins between his fingers before plunging it into Jeonghan’s side. 

Jeonghan gasps. The pain is such a delicious shock to the system that he lets his arms fall back on the tiles. The man yells something in his face, but Jeonghan is lost in the sensation, the fear making him feel weightless as the man keeps screaming with furious eyes. He can almost hear Minghao in his ears. Serene and admonishing in equal measures.  _ That’s enough, Jeonghan. You’ve made your point _ .

The wound is closing itself already when Jeonghan lands a fist on the man’s orbital bone with a sickening crack. It’s quick work after that, unchallenging, the man is too tall to counter the way Jeonghan can get low to the ground. Jeonghan smiles when he disarms him, slices straight across his neck in a clean line. He washes his hands in the dirty puddle he’d landed in, grateful for the rain as he walks back to his home. 

Seokmin is alone in the parlor when he arrives.

“Where have you been?” he whispers, curled into himself on the plush sofa. He moves as if he’s going to stand but stops as if he thinks better of it. Jeonghan glances in his direction, before going to the kitchen for a cup of tea.

“Out,” he says over his shoulder.

“You were hurt, I could feel it.” Seokmin is behind him now, not close enough to touch, but close enough that Jeonghan can hear his quiet voice waver around tears. The clock in the kitchen ticks tauntingly, filling the silence. Jeonghan struggles to swallow his ichor.

“You know? That’s a bit invasive.” Tea pours steaming into the teacup. Jeonghan hasn’t purchased the tea leaves in months, yet somehow his favorite is always kept in the cupboard. “I don’t like that you can nose around in my business whenever you want to.”

When he turns around, Seokmin looks as if Jeonghan has struck him in the face, jaw hanging loose on its hinge. There’s still a shaking to his hands, shirt open and mouth swollen as if he’d just had it on  _ His _ mouth. 

“Why are you so upset with me? I’ve done what you asked. I’ve left you alone, I don’t touch you, I’ve -”

Seokmin can’t ever commit to a fight with somebody he loves. But he does lose his temper at times. Anger pushes its way out of his body rather than his mouth. His frustrations manifest physically, but Seokmin can never commit to bitter words the way Jeonghan can. 

“What makes you think I’m upset with you?” Jeonghan asks coolly.

Seokmin knits his eyebrows together and when he shakes his head in disbelief, Jeonghan can see his tears shown silver in the moonlight of the kitchen window. “You have been avoiding me. For  _ months _ ,  _ hyung _ . It’s like you don’t even live here. And I’m trying to understand why you never come home.”

“You’ve had company,” Jeonghan bites. 

“Oh,” Seokmin says in shock. His eyebrows raise and he lets out a shaky sigh. “Is...is that what this is about?”

This. Him.  _ I have spent my life watching people be in love around me. I will not suffer this, too.  _ Jeonghan wants to scream in Seokmin’s face and his skin boils until it blisters and the teacup in his hand is burning his palm. 

“He’ll die eventually, you know. I know you get your heart broken easily so perhaps you should consider that before you go any further.”

Jeonghan isn’t unfamiliar with the look of betrayal in another man’s face. Most people look that way just before you kill them. As if there’s some pact amongst all humanity that life should always be spared. As if they don’t spend periods of every passing century killing each other for useless wars or arbitrary laws or their own personal vendettas.

“Why would you say that to me?” Seokmin asks in disbelief. “Why would you…”

“I’m protecting you.”

“From what? From somebody I care for dying? As if I don’t already have experience?” Seokmin yells. He hasn’t ever raised his voice at Jeonghan aside from barking instructions across a muddy field in France, shouting for back up as he’s pinned in the dirt. Nothing like the anger he carries in his voice now. Jeonghan withers. 

Jeonghan thinks about Seokmin on his wedding day so often. The details are never quite sharp enough, as if he’s drawing a portrait without looking at the subject. There were peonies on his wife’s gown. He’s not sure of the color, but he knows that there were six on each panel.

“Do you want to experience that again? Watching somebody you care about die?” There is a touch of desperation in Jeonghan’s voice he never meant to be there in the first place.

Seokmin presses the heels of his palms into his eyes like he’s trying to push the tears back inside his eyelids. He shakes his head, drags his fingers down his forehead until they clutch into fists. He speaks with careful measure, but he doesn’t look Jeonghan in the eye. “All I want is to not be alone.” 

\---

Jeonghan leaves three days later.

Guilt is a fly he can’t seem to crush between his palms. He slaps at the air, finds more work, tries out the density of a hundred apologies between his molars. Nothing bites down the way he wants it to. 

And he can make himself disappear when he needs to. He’s out of practice, but he knows how. There’s a hundred different identities under a wooden insert at the bottom of one of his chests in the attic. Soonyoung has provided him with endless possibilities of men he can become and, for now, becoming somebody else might be a comfort.

He convinces his Wo Shing Wo associate to give him an assignment north. Far away from the constriction of the island. He will travel by boat to the mainland.

Something tells him to say goodbye, a part of him he’s filled in before he even died the first time. A gaping hole in him that’s been excavated in the last thirty-one years. Its emptiness catching like a sail that propels him into the parlor on an autumn afternoon.

Seokmin is there with Him on a piano bench, scarcely enough room for two. Jeonghan stops short at the archway and the emptiness in him contracts.

They’re laughing privately to each other and His fingers are delicate and long on the piano keys, his profile on display with its round nose and full lips and long black eyelashes. Seokmin strokes a hand up and down His bare spine as He plays the opening bars to As Time Goes By. It’s a song that spins through their home in endless revolutions.

Jeonghan can see just the one side of Seokmin’s face that isn’t eclipsed by His unkempt hair, disheveled by something Jeonghan can’t help but imagine. Seokmin’s eyes are closed, mouth moving around the lyrics and sung so prettily Jeonghan has a chill running up his neck. Seokmin smiles lazily, sings against His neck so He misses a key and shouts out a half-hearted, “ _ Ai-yah _ ! Seokmin, please.”

They both laugh and Seokmin pulls Him in for another kiss, chest to chest until they pull away for air. Seokmin is looking between his eyes, cupping his cheek, stroking up along the corner of his eyebrow. There's a gentleness in the air. Jeonghan feels like a stranger, like he's not meant to be in a place so tender.

“My Seokmin,” He says, pinching Seokmin’s chin. “How could I have fallen in love with someone so distracting?” 

Seokmin’s smile is so beautiful. Lips parting like the breaking of the day. 

Jeonghan only packs the essentials.

\---

Macau is another city choked by the phantom fists of a country far off on the other side of the globe. But it gives him the opportunity to practice his Portuguese.

He’s been tracking this target for half a year. Jeonghan almost respects the way this man has managed to outmaneuver his former employer. Respect can sometimes be a bullet between the eyes. Because Jeonghan knows which the best ways are to die. He’s experienced some of them recently. Somebody drowned him in a bucket two weeks ago. He prefers a gunshot to the head.

And really this man should have known better than to play the Wo Hop To against the Wo Shing Wo like they’re two toy soldiers for him to smash together with childish fists. Why men play with their mortality this way, he’ll never understand.

They can’t live forever. Jeonghan can. And Jeonghan has died fifteen times in ten months. 

He follows his target through the narrow streets of the city. Jeonghan doesn’t take pains to stay hidden. He lets himself be seen, smirking when his target turns over his shoulder to track Jeonghan’s movement through the crowd, picking up the pace as he tries unsuccessfully to put distance between them.

He is led to a tenement. The locks are easy to break. And when he opens the door, he’s met with a gunshot to the side of his head.

Miles off it’s nighttime in Hong Kong and Seokmin must be settling into bed. He wonders if  _ He  _ is there, with his pretty eyelashes and his deep voice. He wonders if Seokmin is wrapped in His arms. A man who can’t love Seokmin the way Seokmin loves Jeonghan, who can’t understand the depth . 

He hopes that Seokmin feels the way his skull shatters as the .22 caliber bullet pierces just below his temple. How it splinters the bone of his jaw and knocks him clear across the small apartment.

He descends into the darkness hoping that  _ He  _ sees Seokmin’s pain caused by what links them together and knows that He can never be that to Seokmin. No matter how much he loves him.

“Good evening,” Jeonghan smiles, blade against a man’s throat as he regains consciousness “If you’re going to try and kill me, don’t make it so messy next time.”

The man sputters out disbelief from the table where he sits, drops the telephone he was using to make his call. The bullet hole in Jeonghan’s cheek is gone, but his mouth is pooled with blood when he smiles. Growing teeth is such a painful experience and his gums are still throbbing.

He stands above a body slumped and lifeless like he’s stood above the rest. Like he’s seeking out revenge. The men he kills are the tools with which he can exact it.

\---

When Seokmin inevitably asked the question of how Jeonghan had died, Jeonghan had made it sound disinteresting. 

And it was. 

Every day for hundreds and hundreds of years there’s some sorry person greeting the loop of a noose with their throat. If they’re lucky, they’ll be dropped from a small distance and the noose will break their neck and their spinal cord will swell so violently that all their blood and nerves frenzy into silence.

So, he told Seokmin he was hung for treason. A half-truth. He was hung because he attempted to steal from the king’s younger brother and was caught in his home. He was kept imprisoned through his three trials and fed so little that when he was brought out for his execution he nearly drifted away in the breeze. His weight was too insubstantial for the noose to do its job, and he spent the next several hours choking.

\---

He loses track of time between Wuhan and Shanghai, only reminded of the change of the year into 1933 when he arrives in Shanghai with the new year. 

Wuhan had made him numb. The floods from the year prior were devastating, and Jeonghan had to spend two weeks on high ground watching refugees from the banks of Lake Gaoyou die of cholera. It’s not the first natural disaster he’d witnessed, nor had it been the first time he’d seen a government fail to support the poorest of its people with basic necessities to recover from insurmountable fatalities. It would assuredly not be the last time either. Governments and societies were always the same.

Still, in the morning hours when he makes his way out of Wuhan by boat, he braves his way through the familiar smell of open sewage and unwashed bodies. They remind him of being a child, as do the dirty faces of the men who accept the money he offers. 

He’s made a small fortune from a man with gambling debt. Jeonghan leaves feeling like he’s paying a debt. He tries not to dwell on it on the train to Shanghai.

He lives in a hotel for two months, off Xinlie Road, and he becomes used to the white stone facade welcoming him home in the evenings, rich tradesmen in tow. They’re uncomfortable holding Jeonghan’s hand on the street, or kissing him sweetly under bridges, but they are happy to let Jeonghan come down their throat once they’ve made it to his room on the second floor. If they don’t offer him money, Jeonghan takes only the pocket change they won’t miss.

The next target requires information, and men who think they’re taking something from Jeonghan are loose lipped. Jeonghan has slept with more than enough people for intelligence not to dwell on how cheap his body feels after he’s through. Or at least he had in the past. He’d enjoyed himself, then. Now, he squeezes his eyes shut and imagines a softer voice in his ears. Sweet, kind, despite what his hands would do, what his hips would do. The lilt of the syllables of his own name -  _ Jeong-Han _ \- sighed in his imagination, is half the reason he can even finish.

What he finds is that his target lives in the Luwan district and controls a syndicate that’s spread down the coastline like a parasitic weed. He learns, by proxy, that he travels with armed guards and lives behind a gate. He learns, by proxy, that the man is three times his size and snapped a man’s neck once in broad daylight with his bare hands. He learns, by proxy, that if he doesn’t successfully kill him that the Won Shing Wo will terminate his tenuous contract, because his target has a habit of getting people to spill their secrets.

When he finds his target, he’s at home amongst the imported French plane trees and colonists. He eats breakfast with his wife and children, their early morning routine displayed in their windows like a film reel. A picture of colonial life, where the wife cooks pastries in her cheongsam and her children speak better French than they do Mandarin. He waits until she takes them to school before he sneaks into the home and finds his target waiting for his attack like he’d been appraised of his arrival.

He dies twice and in quick succession. Fat, sweaty hands around his throat and the fireworks of capillaries breaking on his face. Twelve seconds of death, life, and then death again. Mortality and immortality and Jeonghan volleyed between them.

The first time.

_ One. _

A train car at dusk and Seokmin’s hands in his, 

shaking with adrenaline.

_ Two. _

Laying on the floor of a hotel in Italy, 

Jeonghan laughing at something Seokmin said until he cries.

_ Three. _

Seokmin’s mouth hot along the seam of his inner thigh, 

the way he looks up through his lashes.

_ Four. _

Seokmin resting his head on Jeonghan’s chest,

Jeonghan whispering comforts to him after another nightmare.

_ Five. _

Jeonghan dancing with Seokmin in the sitting room,

Seokmin stepping on his feet.

_ Six. _

Jeonghan being swung into Seokmin’s arms,

when he finishes his first book in English.

_ Seven. _

All the stars in the sky above the Alps,

_ Hyung, I want to learn all their names. _

_ Eight. _

Shared culture and five hundred years between,

Seokmin cooking what they miss from home.

_ Nine. _

Six men in a house they’ll never return to,

Making a home out of two nights in four walls.

_ Ten. _

_ I could feel it _ . 

_ Eleven _

The plunge into darkness,

the feeling of screaming without sound. 

_ Twelve. _

Utter silence, 

lungs bursting.

Waking and then the second time. 

_ One. _

Black eyes and maliciousness, 

reflected at Jeonghan like staring into a mirror. 

_ Two. _

Half-rotten food on the back of a cart,

enough to help him grow.

_ Three. _

Erosion on the sand in Incheon,

He outlives even the land.

_ Four. _

Mingyu gripping Jeonghan’s shoulders,

_ I don’t sense Soonyoung. Why does he sense me? _

_ Five. _

A grand house in Taegu,

With three sleeping rooms.

_ Six. _

Seokmin in his bed,

_ Then what is it, if not that _ ?

_ Seven. _

Junhui feeding Jeonghan portions of a tangerine,

only after Minghao has tasted.

_ Eight. _

_ I’ve done what you asked. _

_ Nine. _

_ My love. _

_ Ten. _

Darkness,

Again.

_ Eleven. _

He can’t ever be loud enough,

never screams enough in that vast place. 

_ Twelve. _

Though he tries,

every time.

He does his best to try to pry the hands clamped around his neck open with his trembling fingers. Even with the ability to return to life, he still needs time to heal, to refill his empty lungs. The pain in his chest is blinding. A far too familiar feeling of how your lungs  _ ache _ without the air to inflate them.

The man above him shows him a viciousness unexpected from such a short relationship. His forearms flex again as he watches Jeonghan flicker back to life. He squeezes even harder, grits his teeth.

“Why won’t you die?” he says. 

Jeonghan closes his eyes, lets the crashing ocean wave sound of blood in his head drown out the sound of his own gasping. It is an overwhelming sound, a disruption in the blood flow making his ear drum interpret his heartbeat at the sound of crashing waves. 

It is so loud that he does not hear Minghao standing over their man until the very last moment.

Minghao holds his arms out, swords extended out like feathers to his wings. He poises himself gracefully on one leg over the man holding Jeonghan’s throat. The other leg swings upwards, foot coming down on the man’s back so he can hold him still as he crosses both swords in front of the man’s face.

The swords have been sharpened so thoroughly that when he slices across the man’s neck, Jeonghan isn’t touched with a single drop of blood. The maliciousness dies from his eyes as the light dies from his eyes, body slumping forward to fall onto Jeonghan, blood flowing from the wound. Jeonghan’s windpipe reforms itself enough for him to gasp air into his lungs, weighted with a dead man on his chest and Minghao’s eyes on his bruised throat.

“Could have gotten here sooner,” Jeonghan quips, pushing the dead man off himself.

Normally Minghao would laugh, giggle light and airy. He might offer Jeonghan a hand to lift him up from the floor, pull him into a hug.

After so many years, Minghao still finds ways to surprise him.

\---

The archways of Minghao and Junhui’s home curve over him like a canopy of trees. 

The sun settles fat and low on the horizon and spring encroaches, touching what she can, bringing the smell of blossoms on the breeze through the open windows.

Minghao holds his face in two wide palms, pressing into his cheeks enough to bruise. They stand in the parlor, and Minghao’s height means he has to tuck his chin down to bring their eyes to level. Jeonghan looks at the polished floors, at Minghao’s shoes dotted with flecks of blood, at Minghao’s untucked shirt as if he’d dressed in a hurry.

Jeonghan does not look up.

Junhui and him were always the restless ones. Centuries ago, when it was only just the three of them, Minghao would work tirelessly to hide his frustration when Jeonghan would leave without warning. He would flutter from city to city between brief rests in whatever home they made in his absence, never staying long enough for their liking. Minghao and Junhui would do what they could to hold him still, entreat all the parts of him that were sickly and disjointed. 

Moments where Minghao was goading in Jeonghan’s ear as he cracked Junhui’s demeanor apart like porcelain with the swivel of his hips and the sharpness of his teeth. Moments where Mingaho was gentle in his ear and soothing on his back as he kissed away scars made before he had the ability to heal them. Moments of relative security where Jeonghan didn’t need to concern himself with his next meal or where he’d sleep - circumstances he’d force himself into, habits he’d carried from his former life.

He’d float back to them like jetsam, eventually finding shore again until the strength of the tides tangling together forced him back out into the open ocean.

“Jeonghan,” Minghao says tonelessly. 

Minghao soothes his cheeks with the pads of his thumbs, fingernails catching on the short row of Jeonghan’s bottom lashes. Jeonghan flexes his jaw, Minghao presses harder. Time ticks on. It ticks and ticks and ticks.

“Jeonghan,” Minghao says again.

Junhui comes behind him. Jeonghan jumps at Junhui’s hands resting on his hips, thumbs digging into his sides. Junhui rests his forehead against the nape of Jeonghan’s neck, where he’s still sticky with sweat. He sighs against his back, noses up along the center of his spine, presses his weight forward enough Jeonghan has to lock his knees to keep himself upright.

Minghao’s thumbs meet in the center of Jeonghan’s mouth and spread outwards to the corners. The motion distorts his skin, pushing his face into strange shapes, making him ugly and malformed. Junhui pulls their bodies flush and rests his hands on Jeonghan’s stomach. Minghao cups his palms and rests them under Jeonghan’s chin to lift his head. 

Minghao does not carry the weight of one thousand years in any place but his eyes. 

Jeonghan looks at him. Depthless black pupils dilated in the darkening room, catching the orange glow of the retreating sun. Minghao has seen things Jeonghan will never see. Things in time, things in people, things in Jeonghan. 

He conveys them when Jeonghan finally meets his eyes. Hundreds of years of history is snapped like a rope he hadn’t even noticed fraying. Minghao looks fearful and small, like a child peering into the bedroom of their parents asking for consolation after a nightmare. 

Minghao kisses him like he needs to be sure Jeonghan is as real under his mouth as he is under his hands. On the right corner of his lips, then on the left, and solidly on the center.  _ You’re here, I love you, and You’re safe. _

He kisses Minghao back, hands fisted into Minghao’s shirt, blood still staining the edges of their sleeves. Minghao lets himself be kissed, lets Jeonghan suck sighs off his bottom lip and press them back into his mouth with the curl of his tongue.

It lasts only for a moment. Jeonghan’s frenzy is ended with Minghao’s deceptively strong arms pushing him back into Junhui’s chest. He stares at Jeonghan, searching his face with the flick of his timeless eyes. Back and forth and up and down.

Jeonghan cannot express what it is to be split into halves, and quarters, and eighths by two men who have known your body for five hundred years. 

He is held down on the floor of the parlor, forced to be pliant, so that Minghao and Junhui can take turns drinking from his mouth. They are heady and gentle, insistent and loving, as they strip him bare and press their hands into his skin. Hands that keep Jeonghan’s wrists held above his head, until Jeonghan is gasping and writhing, trying to take back control.

Minghao once said he could feel their deaths as keenly as if they were his own, down to the phantom pain of a killing blow. He feels it more strongly than Junhui feels him, or Soonyoung feels Mingyu, or Seokmin feels Jeonghan. 

Jeonghan has died nineteen times in eighteen months. Minghao has felt them all. 

His mouth is gentle over Jeonghan’s belly, smearing his lips across the vanished scar of a knife wound that killed him in Nanking. Jeonghan’s entire body arches into Minghao’s lips, into the hands that hold his sides, tensing even further when Junhui’s fingers follow the path forged by Minghao’s kiss. 

They chase each other through Jeonghan’s past. Over the gunshot to his temple, through the stab wound to his chest, the bullets his heart had taken. Pausing over Jeonghan’s throat, where they chase away the ghost of fingers and rope. Minghao’s wet mouth and Junhui’s careful fingers, a comet and its tail, moving across the expanses of Jeonghan’s skin until he is shaking on the floor.

Jeonghan does not realize he is crying until he speaks. 

“Please,” Jeonghan begs. “Minghao…I want you inside. Please.”

Minghao’s hips are slow and calculated as they push apart Jeonghan’s spread legs. Junhui kisses his tears away, fond and kind, accepting Jeonghan’s soft moans with tenderness. They rest their heads on either side of Jeonghan’s. Minghao moving inside him, Junhui whispering praises, their hands moving across his skin. Their eyes never leave Jeonghan, not even for each other.

Love is not a mystery. Jeonghan bears witness to how it overwhelms people, how it can consume from the inside out. Watching Minghao’s brows draw up, his eyes go wide, his mouth seeks Jeonghan’s as he spills the syllables of Jeonghan’s name, broken and disjointed, into Jeonghan’s mouth makes him feel like he’s swallowed a flame. Jeonghan scrambles one hand into Minghao’s hair, the other onto Junhui’s hip to draw them both closer.

And he loses himself in a love that would consume a person who lived for only eighty years. What he feels for Junhui. What he feels for Minghao. For an ordinary person it would be folklore, it would burn them alive. 

Jeonghan is crying as he finishes, feeling as though he has shattered, Junhui’s mouth swallowing his cock down to the base, their hands intertwined. They stay linked as Junhui cradles Minghao’s forehead against his collarbone, Minghao’s face still displayed to Jeonghan as his sighs get higher and higher in tone until he stills. 

Minghao and Junhui pause to share a moment above him. Their mouths parted as they slide against each other, their eyes open, their hands holding Jeonghan’s. 

For an ordinary person what Minghao and Junhui share is incomprehensible. An extraordinary love meant for extraordinary men. The curse of living forever met with the balm of a soul matched with your own. 

They aren’t meant to be alone. Jeonghan isn’t meant to be alone.

Jeonghan rests his head on the floor of the parlor, the stark white arching beams above him like cumulus clouds, Minghao and Junhui in the edges of his periphery like twinkling stars trapped in the daybreak sky. He lets himself be held and lets the tears on his cheeks be brushed away. 

\---

The days are undisturbed. 

He sits by Minghao as he paints the first blooms of roses in the park. A blanket spread in the grass where he and Junhui rest and measure the hues of blue in the sky. Junhui passes him the bag of huamei and Jeonghan’s mouth is dry from the salt. He finds he doesn’t have much to say, but Junhui still makes him laugh.

They don’t let him sleep alone and the spring is too warm to wear clothes to bed. Jeonghan doesn’t mind when he wakes up, skin stuck to Minghao and Junhui’s, the backs of his knees pooling with sweat. He likes the feeling of his forehead in the center of Junhui’s chest. It’s nearly as broad as Seokmin’s.

Minghao doesn’t initiate the inevitable conversation and Jeonghan wishes that he would. It would be easier that way, if he were pushed off the cliff instead of having to jump himself.

It takes him until a Sunday morning, when the church bells on the other side of the park are ringing for the service. They sit on the porch and the arches insulate them from the sun, the street, the passing cars on the road, the sun. Junhui brings tea for Minghao and Jeonghan. Minghao holds the cup in two hands the way he was taught, despite the finely curved handle.

“How is he?” Jeonghan asks quietly. 

Minghao turns his head with momentary surprise. It melts into warmth. 

“He still writes very often,” Minghao says plainly.

Jeonghan clenches his jaw. “But,  _ how _ is he?”

Minghao tries to soften his frown. Anyone who didn’t know him well wouldn’t catch the edges of his mouth dipping downwards for the fraction of a second. Jeonghan knows him well enough to see the worry.

“You died so many times, Jeonghan.”

It’s an answer in and of itself.

He’s not quite certain when he learned that if a man spills your blood, you spill twice as much of theirs in return. Retribution, a childhood friend. One who has not written or called. He becomes unfamiliar with it in its absence, despite their history.

He’s not sure if he’ll ever be able to swallow the guilt of smiling when he was revived. 

“Is he…” Jeonghan starts and tapers off. A family passes on the road, a baby gurgles in the carriage being pushed by its mother. Jeonghan lets the sound end his sentence.

“Mingyu went to him,” Minghao looks to the sound and then to Jeonghan. “After you had left. Soonyoung arrived months after. Mingyu was the closest and perhaps for the best. He can certainly understand.”

“But...his...”

Minghao shakes his head. He must know about Him. With his long eyelashes and the way Seokmin loved him. Jeonghan has seen the letters Seokmin sends. He never spares a detail.

“It’s just Mingyu and Soonyoung.”

Jeonghan clamps his mouth shut, parting it again only to sip his tea. There are roses blooming along the front pathway, too. He’s not sure why Minghao can’t paint the ones here. He doesn’t understand why he needs to walk to the park just to paint what he can see from his own front window.

“Jeonghan,” Minghao nearly whispers. “He speaks about you. In almost every letter. You ought to know that.”

Jeonghan’s heart skips a beat at the thought.

“Five hundred and sixteen years is a very long time to be alone,” Minghao says. He reaches across the small space separating them on the wicker bench to take Jeonghan’s hand. 

“And one thousand years is a very long time to be in love with someone.” 

Minghao pulls Jeonghan’s hand into his lap. They meet eyes, but Minghao’s fingers never stop moving over Jeonghan’s skin. He fits his fingertips into the spaces between tendons, over the staccato pulse in Jeonghan’s wrist.

“It is,” Minghao says with a hum. “We have been so angry with one another before. So angry we couldn’t stand to be on the same continent.”

“You’ve never told me that.” 

“I’ve made more mistakes than you have, Jeonghan. Remember I had four hundred years to make them before you were even born.”

The drift closer on the bench. Their thighs touch and Jeonghan knocks their knees together.

“Junhui and I are very different,” Minghao says. “I can be difficult, unmovable and he can be... _ unpredictable _ .” He widens his eyes slightly for effect. “You know him, Junhui will do whatever he wants at the end of the day. And sometimes we disagree so intensely we need to spend time away from one another.”

Jeonghan thinks of Seokmin and their differences. Seokmin’s unequaled kindness and Jeonghan’s nihilism. The way Seokmin walks through life with his heart in his palms, allowing anyone and everyone to hold it, while Jeonghan holds his own heart so desperately, protectively, that he’s squeezed the life from it. That Seokmin accepts conditions as they are and works painstakingly to improve what he can see, while Jeonghan argues history into changing for him.

“And you just...forgive one another for the parts of yourselves you can’t change?”

“Not so simply put,” Minghao smiles privately, melancholy. He seems far away in his thoughts. Far enough away that Jeonghan feels safe to rest his cheek on Minghao’s shoulder. His scent is comforting. Tea leaves and sweat. Minghao leans his cheek on the top of Jeonghan’s head.

“We are meant for one another but loving him is deliberate.” 

A mild moment stretches on between the two of them. The heat of the sun touches the rose petals in the yard, warming them until their scent drifts across the porch. The steam from Minghao’s teacup swirls in the air, the blue trim not unlike the sapphire of the spring sky. 

It is strange for Jeonghan to take notice of these details and study them the way he has over the last week. A long exposure photograph, captured in time. Minghao’s fingernails are just slightly too long and the threadbare texture of their trousers rubbing together. The composition of the sunlight on the verdant lawn and smell of roses. The tenderness of a home and the stifling swell of guilt.

“Time saved him for you,” Minghao says after a moment. 

Jeonghan extracts himself from where Minghao weighs him down so he can look Minghao in the eyes. Five hundred years twists itself into something strange and new. An ancient wall finally being chipped away.

“I’m not sure I deserve him,” Jeonghan furrows his brows. The wall that falls is structural, it had been holding Jeonghan steady. He crumbles as it crumbles. 

When Seokmin sees something broken, he tries to bend it back into shape, disbelieving that it can’t be fixed. Jeonghan has lived long enough to know some things will never change. In the world, amongst people, in himself.

Minghao presses his lips against the top of Jeonghan’s knuckles where their hands are still joined. “He’s seen all parts of you, Jeonghan. Show him this one.”

Junhui comes out the front door with his own cup of tea and a soft smile so like Minghao’s, it’s hard to believe they don’t share the same mind. He shoves himself into the nonexistent space between Minghao and Jeonghan on the bench, pushing them apart, and Jeonghan finds himself laughing.

“I think we should go to the sea today,” Junhui says decisively. He leans to kiss Jeonghan’s cheek and then Minghao’s. 

“Or the train station.”

Junhui whips his head to look back at Jeonghan, smile spreading and eyes widening in excitement.

Minghao reaches across to squeeze Jeonghan’s knee. “Or to the train station,” he repeats. It’s an encouragement. A needed one.

Jeonghan’s anxiety bubbles at the thought. He can visualize himself standing on the platform, waiting for the train south and watching it pass by without stepping on board. He can see himself stepping off the ferry from Kowloon to the island and standing at the docks until he can find the ship with the furthest destination to stow away on.

He’s afraid. And he doesn’t want to be alone. And he wants to tell Junhui and Minghao as much. 

But some parts of him will remain constant. As sure as the depth of the sea, no matter how the waves erode the shore.

So instead he scoffs and says, “Traveling is such a bore. Unless you have company.”

Junhui kisses his cheek again for good measure.

\---

The house on Glenealy appears monolithic in the sporadic lamplight curving up the hill. It’s nearing midnight, the city steeping in the humidity of May.

He stands at Seokmin’s bedroom door for what feels like a lifetime.

The four-post bed is still there, but the room is tidied in a way that is distinctly not Seokmin’s doing. He steps past the threshold and pauses. There’s a heap of two big bodies under the sheets, breeze blowing through the slatted windows to blow strands of hair off Mingyu’s forehead. He is slack, cheek pushed up from where it rests on the top of Seokmin’s head. 

He might have been surprised if he didn’t understand what they shared. Mingyu is the youngest and now somehow the mentor. Ready to travel across countries to mend Seokmin’s broken heart the way his own had been mended so many times.

Seokmin clings onto him like a vine, face peaceful where it’s buried in Mingyu’s shoulder. Beautiful enough to make Jeonghan’s thoughts go blank just to see him in person again. His strong brow smoothed with sleep and the sharpness of his nose, the shadow of his eyelashes and the freckle on his cheek.

Jeonghan slides his hand along the polished cherrywood as he takes careful steps to the side of the bed where Seokmin is tangled in a web of sheets. His bare back is all Jeonghan can see from where he stands now. The freckles and the divot of his spine, his smooth tanned skin still golden even in the dark. 

Jeonghan sits on the edge of the mattress, cautious not to get too close, and he reaches out to stroke the back of his knuckles over the round of Seokmin’s shoulder. He’s a deep enough sleeper than Jeonghan is granted this moment before the unknown of the next. Just Jeonghan and the quiet metronome of Seokmin’s breathing, the heat of his familiar skin, the excitement of his touch.

“Seokmin,” he says. His voice is low, but loud enough to make Mingyu stir and peer up over the crown of Seokmin’s head with one eye. 

The realization comes after a beat, and Mingyu’s eyes go wide.

“Seokmin,” Mingyu says urgently.

Seokmin groans in his sleep and rolls to his back. He rubs at his eyes and holds his palms over them in frustration as Mingyu turns on the lamp at the bedside. Jeonghan lets himself take in the sight of Seokmin’s chest, where the sheet stops at his hips.

“What time is it?” Seokmin grumbles, voice gravely with sleep.

Jeonghan licks his lips. He thinks once to touch Seokmin’s arm but hesitates and draws back. “Seokmin,” he says instead. Restrained and small.

When Seokmin finally looks at him, his eyes are wide and bloodshot, and despite not being able to age, he seems like he’s taken on a decade of weariness in them. Jeonghan trains his face to remain as neutral as possible, forces his hands into his own lap so impulse doesn’t force him to touch.

Seokmin sits up in the bed and they’re suddenly so close together. Jeonghan can no longer hear the cacophony of crickets outside or the sound of Mingyu breathing a few feet away. He can only hear the way Seokmin is holding his breath, and how it shutters out of him when he finally exhales.

“Jeonghan?” Seokmin asks. His voice breaks on the syllables, crackling. 

All at once, Jeonghan is gathered into Seokmin’s arms, pulled into him as if he were fragmented pieces made whole by being held together. It stuns him for a moment, how Seokmin immediately presses their bodies flush until Jeonghan is nearly in his lap. Seokmin shoves his forehead against Jeonghan’s ear, holds Jeonghan by the back of his head. He exhales again, and then hitches. Jeonghan can feel the wetness against his cheek from where Seokmin cries, from where he cries, too.

Jeonghan wraps himself in Seokmin, in his heaviness and heat. He slides his hands over Seokmin’s back and through his sweat damp hair. He takes in the familiarity of it and how it anchors him to the skin of the earth, making him feel devastatingly present in the passing of time.

How could he ever think he belongs anywhere else but here?

Junhui had always said that being apart makes him feel strange. Jeonghan understands now. He didn’t then, but he does now.

Seokmin’s cry goes from the gentle fall of tears to the heaving of his chest. Jeonghan digs his nails into Seokmin’s back, attempting to claw his way through to the core of him. He needs him to be open for this, spread wide so Jeonghan can pour himself inside. Words can mean so little if they’re not sunk deep enough.

“I’m sorry,” he whispers into Seokmin’s ear. He hasn’t said those words in so long. They taste strange. Cloying, and somehow so bitter. He bites down on them over and over until they are easier to swallow. “I’m sorry, Seokmin. I’m so sorry.”

Seokmin takes Jeonghan’s face in his hands. They stay that way for a moment, Seokmin taking careful stock of him, as if to be sure he’s still all there, that pieces have not been scattered and lost.

“I could feel you,” Seokmin chokes, face warping in grief. “Every time. It was... _ Jeonghan _ . What happened?”

The guilt spears through Jeonghan again. Only this time the weapon is twisted, twirled around to stir his insides.

“I’m sorry,” he repeats. “I was so hurt. I was angry. I shouldn’t…”

There is still betrayal in Seokmin, the ache from Jeonghan’s words and actions. Only now it blends with relief, confusion, making some strange amalgamation of a wound that won’t heal the same way his others do.

“Please,” Seokmin sighs. “Promise me you’ll never do that to me again. Please,  _ hyung _ . Please.”

The room is brighter now, lights being flicked on all over the house. Jeonghan can see the glow in his periphery and he can hear the echo of excited voices from the foyer. 

He looks at Seokmin’s eyes drift close, watches him take a stabilizing breath and then rest his forehead under Jeonghan’s chin. He holds Jeonghan’s hips in his hands like he’s trying to make them meet in the middle and Jeonghan’s body is in the way.

“I promise,” Jeonghan says softly. He cradles the back of Seokmin’s neck, rests his nose against Seokmin’s hair.

\---

When they’d first toured the home on Glenealy Street, Seokmin had been adamant on finding one with enough rooms. Two large rooms for the two of them, and two guest rooms for the others. Jeonghan had argued against the necessity. Though now it has seemed to come in handy - even with Soonyoung begrudgingly moving out of Jeonghan’s old bedroom because of the clearly defined rules of  _ finders keepers _ .

When they’re together like this it’s as chaotic as it is peaceful. Seokmin, Soonyoung, and Mingyu talk over each other instead of having conversations, and somebody is always playing some instrument, or singing some song, or laughing too loudly.

Jeonghan does his best not to feel like a stranger.

Seokmin’s state of mind isn’t easily revealed anymore. When he was younger, he wore his emotions as plainly as he wore clothes, changing them just often. It seems that certain lessons of Jeonghan’s had rubbed off on him in the end. 

Jeonghan spends more time with Minghao than he normally would. Whatever he can do to avoid feeling like he’s encroaching on Seokmin, constricting his space. He follows Minghao and Junhui like a shadow, latching onto them to not feel the anxiety of Seokmin’s easy smiles and his refusal to make Jeonghan feel even a fraction as guilty as he ought to.

Nothing can be done to relieve the home from the heat of a late spring evening.

The dining room is worlds away from the fine restaurants down the hill. Jeonghan three weeks ago might have fussed over trading a five-course meal under a glittering chandelier for cold noodles and rice wine served with common tableware. Now he thinks of it as a comfort. The way they all talk over one another and pass plates arm over arm. 

He sits across the table from Seokmin, watching his cheeks get rosy the more liquor he drinks. All of them pouring alcohol down their throats to stave off the quick metabolization and the mindfulness of the heat. 

Jeonghan feels whole. 

The sun sets with Soonyoung and Junhui side by side at the piano, Seokmin and Mingyu making clattering noises cleaning the kitchen, and Minghao running his long fingers through Jeonghan’s hair.

Minghao gives a non-committal sound of protest when Jeonghan slides under his arms to lay their bodies flat against each other. Minghao lounges on the couch with a book, and he lifts his arms to allow Jeonghan to lay on his chest so he can rest the book on the back of Jeonghan’s head. His reading undisturbed.

“It is far too hot for this,” Minghao sulks. 

Jeonghan nods in agreement, but he doesn’t move. Junhui plays a soft melody on the piano. “You stole my spot,” he shouts over his shoulder.

“You’re busy,” Minghao giggles, light and bubbling.

“Why don’t you read out loud?” Jeonghan hums. He closes his eyes and melts like warmed wax into the space between Minghao’s legs. They’ve all had enough alcohol that they’ve slipped into a haze, smiles slow as molasses and just as sweet.

“You’ve never been interested in poetry,” Minghao laughs again.

“And I am still not. But I’m not the one reading it, am I?” Jeonghan argues.

Jeonghan hasn’t practiced his Arabic since they’d left Salonica nearly three hundred years ago. What he can’t understand, he enjoys anyway, for only the sound of Minghao’s voice and Minghao’s hand in his hair.

It would be so easy to fall asleep that way, if not for the consequences of all six of them being in the same room. 

Junhui switches through different types of songs, calling out dances as they partner off. Soonyoung and Mingyu laugh their way through the touching of hands meant to be a dance sometime in 1820. Mingyu kisses Soonyoung in apology for whatever steps he misses.

Junhui cackles as he changes the tune.

“Waltz!”

Mingyu clambers away from Soonyoung to take Jeonghan’s hand from his lap.

“It’s so hot,” Jeonghan whines.

“Come on,” Mingyu pleads. He uses his weight and height advantage to yank Jeonghan’s deliberately boneless body off the sofa, pulling him immediately into position to dance.

Jeonghan scrunches his nose as he giggles. Mingyu stumbles over his feet and pouts. 

“Hannie, stop trying to lead. I’m taller.”

“I learned to waltz  _ in _ Vienna. I get to lead.”

They twirl around the parlor as if it were a ballroom, dodging the coffee table and new plush chairs. Jeonghan dips Mingyu in front of each man, waiting for them all to drop a kiss to Mingyu’s forehead and make him squirm. He comes by the piano to do the same, only Junhui starts by licking into Mingyu’s mouth, making Mingyu wriggle out of Jeonghan’s arms and catch himself on the bench. Junhui never even misses a key.

“You’re a terrible dance partner,” Jeonghan says, letting Mingyu prop up his own weight. 

“He gets too distracted,” Seokmin says. Jeonghan glances towards him, where his smile is taking up the bottom half of his face, cheeks flushed from the rice wine and his own turn about the floor. His eyes are colored with fondness as he walks over to take Jeonghan’s hand.

Jeonghan spends several seconds looking at where they are joined before he places his hand on Seokmin’s upper arm. Seokmin beams, shirtsleeves rolled, as he steps into the dance.

“I get to lead?” he asks. Jeonghan falls into step, watching Seokmin’s mouth filled to the backs of his teeth with laughter. Seokmin looks down at their feet as if he’s measuring their steps. “I feel honored.”

“You should,” Jeonghan smirks.

Seokmin makes smaller revolutions around the room. It’s less grand than Mingyu, but far more intimate. Jeonghan’s heart is in the back of his throat, threatening to leap right out of his mouth. Seokmin looks down at him curiously and Jeonghan feels dumbstruck just to have his mouth so close.

It’s strange, to have what once were casual touches become so reserved. Once, Jeonghan wouldn’t have spared a thought for Seokmin’s hand holding his, or his palm against the center of his back. Now, Jeonghan can’t think of anything else, but the places Seokmin touches him. It’s placating and maddening all in one.

It keeps him awake in his bed, hours later, after the alcohol wears off and they all drift to their rooms.

Jeonghan stares at the edge of his pillowcase where his fingers are resting. Imagining them curling around the back of Seokmin’s hand, resting on the slope of Seokmin’s neck down to his shoulder. That he'd never once lacked confidence before, but questions how beautiful his body can really be when not contrasted against Seokmin’s skin. That he wishes he could draw like Minghao to commemorate the monument of it. 

He glances to the door as Seokmin comes into view, hand hovering as he was poised to knock, catching Jeonghan’s eyes.

“Did you know I was coming?” Seokmin asks amusedly.

Jeonghan sits up in his bed, smooths the sheets over his lap. “You walk loudly.”

Seokmin offers him a timid smile. “Can I...um...can I come in?”

Jeonghan nods slowly, keeping his eyes on Seokmin as he approaches the side of his bed. He glances down like he’s hesitant to sit on the mattress, but Jeonghan, out of habit, moves aside so Seokmin can settle next to him against the pillows.

It’s not something they haven’t done hundreds of times before. But the intimacy of it is stifling, forcing a confession to the top of Jeonghan’s tongue. He trains his eyes on a loose thread at the end edge of the sheet, focusing on that rather than his own emotional response to Seokmin being so near to him after so long.

“Are you alright?” Seokmin asks earnestly.

“Yes, of course. Why wouldn’t I be?” 

“I don’t know...you haven’t been quite yourself.” Seokmin glances down at Jeonghan’s fingers and then reaches out to still them with his own. For the second time in one night, a simple touch sends Jeonghan into a downward spiral.

He allows Seokmin to tangle their hands, his gentleness a gift he bestows too easily. Jeonghan sighs, glances in Seokmin’s direction.

“I missed you,” Seokmin says once they meet eyes. He glances down at their hands pointedly. “I missed this.”

Where Seokmin gained his capacity to love is a mystery. It seems almost as supernatural as his inability to die. 

“I want you to know that I forgive you,” Seokmin says, silken soft and kind.

“You’ve said as much.” Jeonghan deflects. 

“I don’t hold grudges like you do,” Seokmin jokes.

“I don’t hold grudges.”

“ _ Hyung _ , I’ve known you for almost forty years. You hold grudges.”

The tension dispels minutely, a valve turned for a half a second to release the critical pressure. It makes it easier for Seokmin to rest his cheek on Jeonghan’s shoulder, for Seokmin to wrap his arm around Jeonghan’s back. The first sprouts of green after a wildfire.

“Seokmin, I…” Jeonghan tries. He can talk men into sacrificing everything they have for him, but he can’t talk himself into doing the same. Seokmin squeezes his shoulder reassuringly until Jeonghan continues. “I don’t know if I’ll ever forgive  _ myself  _ for doing what I did.”

Jeonghan has to crane his neck to see Seokmin’s brow furrow. 

“It was the worst thing I have ever experienced in my entire life. It would be a lie for me to pretend like it wasn’t awful.”

“Will you tell me?” Jeonghan whispers, forced into quiet by Seokmin’s honesty.

“Are you sure that’s a good idea?” Seokmin tips his head back on Jeonghan’s shoulder so he can look up at Jeonghan’s face. His eyes are wide, eyebrows shot up with surprise.

“Why wouldn’t it be a good idea? I hurt you, I want you to be able to tell me.”

Seokmin stares up at him with shock for a long time. It makes Jeonghan feel dizzy, the way he deconstructs yet another wall to build a door, handing Seokmin the key. 

Eventually, Seokmin sighs shakily, squeezing Jeonghan’s hand.

“Before you left Hong Kong I could feel this...sinking feeling every now and then. Just like how it was before we left Chicago. I know you can’t feel it, but it’s...I can’t even describe it. It’s like the worst fear you’ve ever felt but worse.”

Jeonghan feels guilt for that, too. His inability to understand. He presses his thumb into Seokmin’s knuckle.

“But when you die,” Seokmin’s eyes glitter with the first wave of tears, his lip trembles as he looks at their hands. “Jeonghan, it is worse than dying myself.”

“And you were dying so much. So  _ many times _ .”

Jeonghan can feel tears at the corners of his eyes, too.

“I’m sorry.”

“I couldn’t do anything. I couldn’t even get out of bed for so long. I feel exactly where it happened to you.” He unlinks their hands, his fingers reaching up to touch Jeonghan’s chest and drawing away just as quickly. “And all I could think was that I needed to find you and help you...but I couldn’t....I didn’t know what to do.”

He cries openly now, they both do. Jeonghan long lost empathy working its way to settle in his chest like a weight. 

“I was so mad,” Jeonghan says. “And jealous that you had somebody else…” As if that were enough of an explanation. It feels weak coming from his mouth, hanging limp between them.

Seokmin looks up to him again. “He left you know. I loved him so much and he just...he couldn’t stand it to be around me. He thought I had lost my mind.”

Minghao had been so reticent with the details, but Jeonghan had only assumed Seokmin’s being alone was a consequence of his actions. Jeonghan is so good at getting his way. All he had wanted in those moments of destruction was to remind Seokmin that Jeonghan was all he really had, no matter who he chose to spend decades of his life loving.

Now, all Jeonghan wants is for Seokmin to have anyone else. Anyone would be better than he is.

“I’m so sorry,” Jeonghan breathes. “I ruined everything for you.”

Jeonghan wipes at his own eyes and looks away once he notices Seokmin’s eyes going soft. Seokmin reaches up, brushes a tear from Jeonghan’s cheek. In a flash of impulse, Jeonghan grabs hold of the back of Seokmin’s hand and presses a kiss to his palm.

He wants to kiss apologies into Seokmin’s skin until they’re scars, carried for the rest of his life.

“Jeonghan, you didn’t,” Seokmin says. His eyes are kind when they shouldn’t be. His gaze like the cradle of his arms, comforting and warm.

“You don’t have to lie just because I’m crying.” Jeonghan laughs bitterly. He wipes his own tears, trying to shrug off the look Seokmin gives him so Seokmin can understand. Like he’s trying to imprint his own mistakes, so Seokmin remembers to hate him.

“Jeonghan, please listen to me,” Seokmin says with sudden resolve. “I know you don’t feel what I feel for you, and that’s alright. But you have to know that I love you.”

Jeonghan sighs at the words, pressing his forehead to Seokmin’s. 

It’s against his better judgement. Against what he deserves. But, hearing Seokmin saying the words again, whispering therm against Jeonghan’s lips, makes him feel as if he’s grown wings.

He blinks his eyes open and Seokmin is there with his beautiful eyes and the goodness behind them.

It is the man that Jeonghan loves. The man who was astonishingly born for him. A perfect harmonization of Jeonghan’s soul. The kindness to balance the bitterness and the sensitivity to soften the sharpness. Seokmin meant to excavate the parts of Jeonghan he had forgotten. 

Seokmin cradles his head. He sighs, “I love you. I’ve been in love with you for so long. I’ll love you for the rest of my life and I will never stop. Even when you do things to hurt me. Because we are connected and we can’t change that. I know you don’t want it to be that way. I’m sorry.”

Jeonghan can only measure the moments in his life by the flashing of an image. The photograph, held still, unmoving. Color draining and edges fading, but image still intact. 

He remembers these words.  _ I love you. We can’t change that _ . An echo through time. Repeating, repeating, repeating.

“I love you, too,” Jeonghan says. He makes sure to look Seokmin in the eye, does his best to keep his voice steady. And he’s grateful he does.

Seokmin’s entire body looks as though a weight has been removed from it. His chest expands as if his heart is expanding. Somehow become larger to make room for Jeonghan, to fit more than just the thought of him. Now he can place him there in his entirety, body big enough to hold them both. 

He slides his palms over Jeonghan’s shoulders, up to cup his jaw, a fresh wave of tears starting down his own cheeks.

“Really?” he asks. And he is a boy all over again. Eyes marveling at a man in an alleyway who is just like him.

Jeonghan allows himself the gentleness of a moment like this. Seokmin’s face under his fingertips, the slope of his nose and the plush of his mouth. It’s like he is seeing him for the first time. 

“I love you,” he says again, in lieu of answering the question. 

This time Seokmin kisses him. 

Watching Minghao and Junhui fold into one another for centuries had made him resentful. Now he understands them. 

It is a singular thing to kiss Seokmin like this, no barrier between them, only the bond and a promise of forever. It is freeing despite the commitment, it is private despite the honesty. He thinks that maybe he will never be able to get close enough, never be able to hold Seokmin as much as he wants to. 

He’s always been so greedy. Endless amounts of time and he wants nothing more than to capitalize on every moment as quickly as he can. 

They sink into the sheets, hands twined, lips open, kissing slow and hungry as they have been starved for thirty-nine years. They stay that way until dawn. Touching, holding, tasting. Years sprawled out at their feet and still unable to waste a night. 

____________________________________________________________________________

_ Paris, Again _

_ 1994 _

____________________________________________________________________________

Seokmin is struggling to steer his motorcycle through the traffic on Avenue Montaigne. Jeonghan rests his head on Seokmin’s shoulder, breathes in the sharp scent of his Dior cologne, squeezes his hips as he narrowly misses a pedestrian. Seokmin calls out an apology and Jeonghan buries his head on Seokmin’s shoulder to hide his laughter.

The apartment hasn’t changed aside from the introduction of modern amenities, a kitchen rather than a scullery, a washing machine, and electrical sockets in the walls. There’s still the same gilded trim and lead glass windows leading out to the terrace, a gentle snow falling on the iron-work railing.

The last time they had been here was 1972 and prior to that 1943. The second time being shortly after Jeonghan had felt the connection himself. Seokmin had been shot, the guns over the course of history only becoming stronger and stronger, and Jeonghan had felt the ripping pain of a high caliber bullet ripping through his chest, only to find he hadn’t been shot at all. 

He was inconsolable. 

For many reasons.

When the connection tugs between them, it empties Jeonghan’s mind of the rationality he prides himself on. Instead, he forgets entirely that Seokmin will wake up in less than a minute, he panics, feels the pain of grief and the sudden wash of anger, the harrowing experience of fear unlike anything he’d ever felt. 

And it takes him back to two years in China, where he’d used that connection like a weapon.

Seokmin walks around the sitting room with his eyes cast upwards, the heavy thunking sound of his combat boots distending the floorboards. His back is turned towards Jeonghan, but he can see the shaking of his torso revealing how he’s trying not to cry after being back after such a long time. Ever so emotional, wrecked by the most innocuous things.

Jeonghan tucks his long, ashy blonde hair behind his ears, comes up to hug Seokmin from behind. He smiles against the back of his neck where the shaved hairs are starting to grow in again, and kisses at the dip of his tendons right at the base of his skull. 

Seokmin responds by holding his hands where they’re interlaced around his middle, turning his head back to kiss Jeonghan fully on the mouth. His lips taste like salt from the tracks of tears that have made it over the edges of his cheekbones. And Jeonghan readjusts so he can put his hands on Seokmin’s cheeks, brush away the tears under Seokmin’s eyes.

“Oh, don’t cry,  _ nae sarang _ ,” Jeonghan whispers, pressing his lips around a smile.

After one hundred years, he’s come to know how Seokmin’s face reveals when the love in his heart is making it thud faster. How his eyes go soft and his lips go slack, and how he can’t help but laugh like he’s surprised by it. 

“It’s always so strange being back here,” Seokmin says. He runs his hands across Jeonghan’s back, caging his waist so delicately as if Jeonghan might break. “With you. Like this.”

“Mm,” Jeonghan agrees, swaying them from side to side. “I fell in love with you here.”

Seokmin sucks in a breath like he hasn’t heard it thousands of times before. 

They only have four days here. By Friday they’ll board a plane to Seoul to join the rest. Soonyoung had called him two weeks ago at their last hotel in Brussels. He swore on the phone that if Jeonghan kept Seokmin from the group for such an important occasion, he’d come and kidnap him.

They don’t celebrate every birthday. It would be too tedious, and birthdays don’t necessarily carry the same importance when your lifespan is endless. Instead, they celebrate the centuries. 

There had been some discussion as to how a century was measured. They’d come to a general consensus that it would be on the day of the first time they died. To an outsider it could be morbid to celebrate a death. But life only had really begun for them after that first time they spent twelve seconds in darkness. The person they were before forgotten and replaced by someone new.

It has been ninety-nine years and three hundred and sixty-two days since Seokmin had first drowned in the Pacific Ocean. And nearly the same span of time since Jeonghan had first come upon Seokmin bleeding in an alleyway in San Francisco.

They walk down, hand in hand, to the grocer on the corner. Seokmin speaks impeccable French when he orders them warm bread, smells the hard packed cheeses and mulls over the wine selection. The clerk comments on his accent and Seokmin gives his gratitude with a smile. 

“I had a very good teacher,” he says.

They fuss at each other over how to light the fireplace because their last few homes had a gas ignition. Jeonghan pesters Seokmin as he tries to shove crumpled newspapers under the logs. Seokmin whines about his criticism. Jeonghan reminds him that out of the two of them, only one was born after the advent of electricity. Seokmin gives up and Jeonghan fails twice. Seokmin ends up lighting it in the end.

They lie side by side of the shaggy rug in the living room as they had done so many times before. Seokmin has put his curated spread of cheeses on a plate between them. Jeonghan pours them wine. Seokmin feeds him grapes.

He laughs when Jeonghan bites the tip of his thumb, but the way he watches Jeonghan’s mouth shows how much he wants him.

“Relax. I’m still hungry,” Jeonghan laughs. He daintily sips from his wine glass, looking at Seokmin over the edge.

“Then stop teasing,” Seokmin hums. He drinks from his own glass, mockingly mirroring Jeonghan’s expression.

“It’s not my fault that after sixty years you still haven’t learned any self control.”

Seokmin smiles and presses another grape against Jeonghan’s lips.

“Can you blame me?”

He’d been so worried about it once. Sometime ten years in, just after the second world war had dwindled into sparks and ashes and the world settled into calm again. Their lives had gone from being ruled by chaos to being stifled by monotony. Behind the walls of a pristine white house in Belgravia, Jeonghan had worried that the world was not the only thing that had transitioned from raging heat into something cold.

Seokmin is not the fissures and cracks in composure, nor is he the flaring burst of fireworks. He is as sure as the sun rising in the morning, lighting the day. Bright and constant, reliable and warm. 

Romance, to him, is as romance was before his feelings were reciprocated. Arms to welcome Jeonghan in their bed and tea made before Jeonghan wakes up. Enthusiasm at Jeonghan’s joys and tears at Jeonghan’s sorrows. Molding himself around Jeonghan’s tumultuousness and giving him the chance to breathe when he needs it.

Jeonghan thinks that maybe, in the end, he was lucky to have found something he would be devastated to lose. 

Seokmin knocks his wine glass off the carpet when he pulls Jeonghan into his lap. The glass tinkles as it rolls back and forth across the wooden floor, wine pooling between the slats. Jeonghan laughs at his clumsiness, burns when he realizes that Seokmin is too focused on kissing his mouth open to notice.

One hundred years has not made sex any less exciting. Whatever gods there are that bound them together, who make it so they ache when they are apart, have also rewarded them for pressing their bodies into one another. Jeonghan has to force himself not to come when Seokmin takes him into his mouth. So sure of himself now that he’s learned what Jeonghan needs in order to curl his toes, push Seokmin’s head away because the feeling is too overwhelming.

Seokmin doesn’t relent. He takes Jeonghan’s hands in his, twining their fingers, and holds them down against the floor until Jeonghan shakes. And even then he doesn’t stop. He swallows him, all of him, takes him whole in his mouth.

So much of what Seokmin knows is an effect of some lesson Jeonghan has taught him, intentional or not. But Seokmin must not really understand how much Jeonghan has learned from Seokmin.

Jeonghan learns how beautiful it is to have somebody push your body open with their eyes on yours. How a smile at your soft sounds does not always have to be vitriolic. That being desperate for someone to touch you is not a weakness.

“You’re so beautiful,” Seokmin whispers. He marks it by studying Jeonghan’s face, wonder in his eyes that would have made a past version of Jeonghan wither or preen depending on the circumstances. Now he blooms, unfurls for Seokmin with spread legs and parted lips.

Nothing feels more right than to have Seokmin inside him. He knows Seokmin feels it too. He says as much in harsh breaths as Jeonghan pins his shoulders to the floor, not moving until Seokmin has earned it.

Jeonghan takes him apart in his own turn. He is not unaccustomed to someone underneath him, begging him for more. It’s different when it’s Seokmin. For Seokmin it’s a kindness, a symbol of his affection. Seokmin leaves his hands above his head without Jeonghan placing them there. An act of surrender, for Jeonghan to do as he pleases. An act of trust, for Jeonghan to know his body more than he does.

“ _ Jagiya _ ,” Seokmin groans. “You’re going to kill me.”

“That turn of phrase doesn’t really pack the punch you want it to,” Jeonghan grins. He slides his hands down Seokmin’s wrists on the floor, hips lifting up aching slow and falling back down harshly. It knocks a sharp exhale from Seokmin’s nose. He looks at Jeonghan with a plea, his lip caught between his teeth.

He moves sporadically and Seokmin watches him awe, eyes twinkling, smile blinding. He loves all parts of Jeonghan. Even this one. The domineering one, the one who likes to have spellbound eyes watching his every move. 

Seokmin tumbles over the edge with Jeonghan. Seokmin breaks out of Jeonghan’s hold easily, rises to wrap his arms around him, gripping him tightly as the feeling washes through them, in them, around them. The free-falling feeling, into the depthless sort of pleasure they can only really find with one another. Jeonghan holding Seokmin’s shoulders. Seokmin breathing against his cheek.

It’s the sort of thing that makes Jeonghan question why he’d ever fought letting Seokmin have him like this. 

Seokmin lies naked on the floor of the sitting room, Jeonghan’s head on his chest, running reverent fingers through Jeonghan’s hair. Achingly gentle, touching the high arch of Jeonghan’s cheek bones and the spaces between his eyebrows. Smiling down at him like he was responsible for the moon in the sky, the bloom of flowers.

“I’m not sure I’ll be able to sit on a plane if we keep up like this for the next four days,” Jeonghan whispers, smiling conspiratorially.

Seokmin laughs. “We can switch back and forth.”

“What has gotten into you?” 

“I’m not sure,” Seokmin says, seriously. He rests his head back on the floor, searching the gold trim ceiling like it will give him an answer. “Maybe it’s being back here. Some kind of pavlovian response.”

Jeonghan makes a sound of agreement. “Pavlov was an idiot. Dogs just like food. Also…we have had  _ a lot _ of sex in this apartment.

“ _ A lot _ .” Seokmin smiles.

“Back then when we first figured it out,” Jeonghan whispers. He leans up to rest on his elbow so he can see Seokmin’s face, the slight blush that dusts his cheeks. “You used me like a new toy.”

“Oh,  _ Jeonghan _ ,” he groans. Don’t make it sound so gross. You know that’s not how it was.”

Jeonghan grins. “There’s nothing wrong with that. I wanted you so much back then. I’m glad you finally caved.”

“I can’t believe you didn’t know.”

“Know what?”

Seokmin tucks Jeonghan’s hair behind his ear, looking between his eyes. “That I’d loved you ever since you’d found me.”

They will never make sense of what has happened to them. Out of the millions and millions of people who have come before them, and those that will come after, they were made to stand apart. 

Seokmin has believed in fate since Jeonghan found him in the alleyway, he believes things happen with a purpose not yet revealed. Jeonghan finds that hard to believe. There’s no sense in dwelling on the connections between things. He’s sure Seokmin will grow out of the idealism.

But he wonders, that when he was made to live forever, if being alone was necessary. That maybe, he needed to experience isolation for five hundred years in order to feel love as deeply as he does now. That maybe, if he couldn’t love that way he has learned to, he wouldn’t be able to love Seokmin as he deserves to be loved. Wholly, unyielding, freely.

Seokmin falls asleep on the floor of the apartment, face peaceful. He will never look any differently than he does now. He will never carry the passage of time on his face or in his body. He will never get laugh lines by his eyes or go grey by his temples. He will only be able to mark his years with more stories, more love. Like the rest of them.

Seokmin’s chest rises with breath, empties with a sigh, the rhythm of his heart a steady beat. Over and over for the rest of time, never ending, a pretty song. Jeonghan will dance in time with it until the end of the world.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [my twitter](https://twitter.com/lithomancy)
> 
> [kim's twitter](https://twitter.com/dygonilly)


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